CT-based radiomics for predicting radio-chemotherapy response and overall survival in nonsurgical esophageal carcinoma

Background: To predict treatment response and 2 years overall survival (OS) of radio-chemotherapy in patients with esophageal cancer (EC) by radiomics based on the computed tomography (CT) images. Methods This study retrospectively collected 171 nonsurgical EC patients treated with radiochemotherapy from Jan 2010 to Jan 2019. 80 patients were randomly divided into training (n = 64) and validation (n = 16) cohorts to predict the radiochemotherapy response. The models predicting treatment response were established by Lasso and logistic regression. A total of 156 patients were allocated into the training cohort (n = 110), validation cohort (n = 23) and test set (n = 23) to predict 2-year OS. The models predicting 2-year OS were established by the Lasso Cox model and Cox proportional hazards model. Results To predict the radiochemotherapy response, WFK as a radiomics feature, and clinical stages and clinical M stages (cM) as clinical features were selected to construct the clinical-radiomics model, achieving 0.78 and 0.75 AUC (area under the curve) in the training and validation sets, respectively. Furthermore, radiomics features called WFI and WGI combined with clinical features (smoking index, pathological types, cM) were the optimal predictors to predict 2-year OS. The AUC values of the clinical-radiomics model were 0.71 and 0.70 in the training set and validation set, respectively. Conclusions This study demonstrated that planning CT-based radiomics showed the predictability of the radiochemotherapy response and 2-year OS in nonsurgical esophageal carcinoma. The predictive results prior to treatment have the potential to assist physicians in choosing the optimal therapeutic strategy to prolong overall survival.