Joint use of the radiomics method and frozen sections should be considered in the prediction of the final classification of peripheral lung adenocarcinoma manifesting as ground-glass nodules
Introduction
Lung cancer is the most common cancer (11.6 % of total cancers) and the leading cause of death from cancers worldwide (18.4 % of total cancer deaths) [1], with adenocarcinoma being the most common histological type of lung cancer [2,3]. A new classification of lung adenocarcinoma was established in 2011, dividing lung adenocarcinoma into atypical adenomatous hyperplasia (AAH), adenocarcinoma in situ (AIS), minimally invasive adenocarcinoma (MIA) and invasive adenocarcinoma (IAC) [4], consistent with the classification of lung adenocarcinoma published by WHO in 2015 [5]. In recent years, the detection rate of pulmonary nodules has been increased rapidly. GGNs is a special type of pulmonary nodule, and compared to solid nodules, the appearance of GGNs suggests a high risk of early lung cancer [6,7]. Except for several studies confirming GGNs as lung squamous cell carcinoma, the majority of malignant GGNs have been confirmed as early lung adenocarcinoma [8,9].
The progression of GGNs from AAH, AIS and MIA to IAC is a continuous and dynamic process accompanied by the increment of malignancy [10]. The intraoperative classification of early lung adenocarcinoma is of great significance in determining surgical strategy [11]. FS currently plays a main role in the intraoperative diagnosis and classification of early lung adenocarcinoma, guiding the surgery treatment. However, the classification accuracy of FS is unsatisfactory, and for some cases, it cannot give timely pathological classification due to the poor quality or sampling problems (FS deferrals), [[12], [13], [14], [15]]. This may lead to an inappropriate surgical strategy and even a second surgery for patients [11,14,15].
Radiomics, as an emerging technology, transforms medical images and information into quantitative data and then extracts many quantitative features that can be used as a non-invasive method for evaluating many tumor characteristics. Many studies have confirmed that radiomics has a high clinical application value [[16], [17], [18]]. Compared to the histopathological method, radiomics can be used as a “virtual biopsy” technique, can quantitatively analyze the entire tumor tissue, and has no sampling location limitation, thus providing richer and more complete tumor information for clinical diagnosis, treatment, and prognostic evaluation [[19], [20], [21], [22]]. The applications of radiomics in the field of lung cancer have been investigated widely, and many studies have confirmed its good prospect [[23], [24], [25], [26]].
In some studies, CT-based radiomics method was used to predict the pathological classification of lung adenocarcinoma manifested as GGNs [27,28], showing the usefulness of radiomics. However, those studies placed more emphasis on preoperative evaluation, and there is a lack of relevant studies focused on the comparison between radiomics method and FS to determine whether radiomics can benefit intraoperative classification. In this study, we compared the classification accuracy of radiomics and FS, and explored the value of joint consideration of those two methods for the intraoperative classification of peripheral lung adenocarcinoma manifesting as GGNs.
Section snippets
Data collection
This retrospective study was approved by the ethics committee of Shanghai Pulmonary Hospital, and the informed consent requirement was waived. A search of patients with peripheral lung adenocarcinoma manifesting as GGNs confirmed by surgery and preoperative CT from January 2017 to August 2018 in our hospital was performed.
The inclusion criteria were as follows: (i) had preoperative examination of CT within one month, (ii) maximum diameter of GGNs were ≤3 cm, (iii) preoperative CT layer
Baseline characteristics
AAH is generally considered benign and treated by follow-up strategy, however, surgical resection is usually recommended for AIS, MIA, and IAC, making AAH resection cases much lower than AIS, MIA, or IAC. Because of the clinical value of distinguishing AAH from AIS, MIA and IAC, AAH was separated into an independent group in this study. Through searching the data from January 1, 2017 to August 1, 2018, 4146 GGNs confirmed as early lung adenocarcinomas were obtained, including 247 cases of AAH,
Discussion
The timely and accurate intraoperative pathological classification of peripheral lung adenocarcinoma directly determines the optimum surgical strategy for patients, especially for the extension of lesions resection. Frozen section errors and deferrals have a significant clinical impact on the surgical treatment of patients with early lung adenocarcinoma, and a second surgery may be conducted after the initial surgery [11,14]. Limited resection is recommended for AIS and MIA, while lobectomy is
Conclusions
This study showed that radiomics classifier exhibited satisfactory classification performance in peripheral lung adenocarcinoma manifesting as GGNs in comparison with FS, and that it could serve as a reliable complementary method when FS can’t give timely pathological classification. In addition, different diagnosis between FS and radiomics was the independent predictive factor for the misdiagnosis of FS (OR: 7.46; P < 0.001). The intraoperative classification of cases where FS had a different
Funding
This work was supported by Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai [grant Number 19ZR1443100] and project of capacity construction of assisting departments of clinic in Shanghai municipal hospital [grant Number SHDC22015037].
The funders have no role in the study design, data collection, data analysis and writing the manuscripts.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare no potential conflicts of interest.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to express their sincere gratitude to those contributing to this study who are not identified as authors, as they have lent assistance in the course of this research. We gratefully acknowledge the help of Ms. Liping Zhang and Ms. Yan Huang (Department of pathology, Shanghai Pulmonary Hospital, Tongji University School of Medicine), who helped to correct the diagnoses of the postoperative paraffin sections. Without their help, completion of this study and the manuscript
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These authors contributed equally to this work.