A Reliable Prediction Model for Renal Cell Carcinoma Subtype Based on Radiomic Features from 3D Multiphase Enhanced CT Images

Background This study aimed to develop a prediction model to distinguish renal cell carcinoma (RCC) subtypes.Methods The radiomic features (RFs) from 5 different computed tomography (CT) phases were used in the prediction models: noncontrast phase (NCP), corticomedullary phase (CMP), nephrographic phase (NP), excretory phase (EP), and all-phase (ALL-P).Results For the ALL-P model, all of the RFs obtained from the 4 single-phase images were combined to 420 RFs. The ALL-P model performed the best of all models, with an accuracy of 0.80; the sensitivity and specificity for clear cell RCC (ccRCC) were 0.85 and 0.83; those for papillary RCC (pRCC) were 0.60 and 0.91; those for chromophobe RCC (cRCC) were 0.66 and 0.91, respectively. Binary classification experiments showed for distinguishing ccRCC vs. not-ccRCC that the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of the ALL-P and CMP models was 0.89, but the overall sensitivity/specificity/accuracy of the ALL-P model was better. For cRCC vs. non-cRCC, the ALL-P model had the best performance.Conclusions A reliable prediction model for RCC subtypes was constructed. The performance of the ALL-P prediction model was the best as compared to individual single-phase models and the traditional prediction model.