Computed tomography based radiomic signature as predictive of survival and local control after stereotactic body radiation therapy in pancreatic carcinoma

Purpose To appraise the ability of a radiomics signature to predict clinical outcome after stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) for pancreas carcinoma. Methods A cohort of 100 patients was included in this retrospective, single institution analysis. Radiomics texture features were extracted from computed tomography (CT) images obtained for the clinical target volume. The cohort of patients was randomly divided into two separate groups for the training (60 patients) and validation (40 patients). Cox regression models were built to predict overall survival and local control. The significant predictors at univariate analysis were included in a multivariate model. The quality of the models was appraised by means of area under the curve and concordance index. Results A clinical-radiomic signature associated with Overall Survival (OS) was found significant in both training and validation sets (p = 0.01 and 0.05 and concordance index 0.73 and 0.75 respectively). Similarly, a signature was found for Local Control (LC) with p = 0.007 and 0.004 and concordance index 0.69 and 0.75. In the low risk group, the median OS and LC in the validation group were 14.4 and 28.6 months while in the high-risk group were 9.0 and 17.5 months respectively. Conclusion A CT based radiomic signature was identified which correlate with OS and LC after SBRT and allowed to identify low and high-risk groups of patients. © 2019 Cozzi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.