Radiomics predicts risk of cachexia in advanced NSCLC patients treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors.

Abstract

Approximately 50% of cancer patients eventually develop a syndrome of prolonged weight loss(cachexia), which may contribute to primary resistance to immune checkpoint inhibitors(ICI). This study utilised radiomics analysis of 18F-FDG-PET/CT images to predict risk of cachexia that can be subsequently associated with clinical outcomes among advanced non-small cell lung cancer(NSCLC) patients treated with ICI. Baseline(pre-therapy) PET/CT images and clinical data were retrospectively curated from 210 ICI-treated NSCLC patients from two institutions. A radiomics signature was developed to predict the cachexia with PET/CT images, which was further used to predict durable clinical benefit(DCB), progression-free survival(PFS) and overall survival(OS) following ICI. The radiomics signature predicted risk of cachexia with areas under receiver operating characteristics curves (AUCs) ≥ 0.74 in the training, test, and external test cohorts. Further, the radiomics signature could identify patients with DCB from ICI with AUCs≥0.66 in these three cohorts. PFS and OS were significantly shorter among patients with higher radiomics-based cachexia probability in all three cohorts, especially among those potentially immunotherapy sensitive patients with PD-L1-positive status (p < 0.05). PET/CT radiomics analysis has the potential to predict the probability of developing cachexia before the start of ICI, triggering aggressive monitoring to improve potential to achieve more clinical benefit.