CT-based radiomic analysis of hepatocellular carcinoma patients to predict key genomic information.

Abstract

e15623 Background: The utilization of computed tomography (CT) has virtually replaced the need for tissue diagnosis in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Imaging features (e.g. size, shape and vascularity) have been associated with patient survival. However, the full potential of CT in HCC diagnosis may not be reached, as high-throughput computing allows for extraction of quantitative features that are not part of radiologists’ lexicon. The purpose of this study was to investigate the ability of radiomic analysis to successfully identify specific doxorubicin chemoresistant genes on CT images of treatment-naïve hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Methods: We identified 27 treatment-naïve patients with a single HCC tumor from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) whom had gene expression profiles. Baseline CT images were obtained from The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA). 3D Slicer software was used for manual tumor segmentation and final segmented images were reviewed by a board-certified radiologist. Following tumor segmentation, texture analysis was performed on MATLAB environment. A total of 310 rotation invariant texture features, which measure tumor heterogeneity, were obtained (first-order histogram and grey level co-occurrence matrix). The mRMR method was used to select the most relevant radiomic features. ROC analysis and LOOCV were used to assess the performance of five specific genes known to confer doxorubicin chemoresistance (TP53, TOP2A, CTNNB1, CDKN2A and AKT1). Results: Radiomic analysis identified TP53 (AUC = 86.61%, Specificity = 92.31%, Sensitivity = 92.9%), TOP2A (AUC = 78.0%, Specificity = 69%, Sensitivity = 85.7%), CTNNB1 (AUC = 86.8%, Specificity = 92.3%, Sensitivity = 85.7%), CDKN2A (AUC = 76.9%, Specificity = 76.9%, Sensitivity = 78.6%) and AKT1 (AUC = 72.5%, Specificity = 69.2%, Sensitivity = 85.7%) in treatment-naïve HCC CT studies. Conclusions: The identification of specific genes that confer chemoresistance to doxorubicin can be reliably ascertained via the use of radiomic analysis. This study may help tailor future treatment paradigms via the ability to categorize HCC tumors on genetic level and identify tumors which may not have a favorable response to doxorubicin based therapies.