Assessing microvascular invasion in HBV-related hepatocellular carcinoma: an online interactive nomogram integrating inflammatory markers, radiomics, and convolutional neural networks.

Objective: The early recurrence of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) correlates with decreased overall survival. Microvascular invasion (MVI) stands out as a prominent hazard influencing post-resection survival status and metastasis in patients with HBV-related HCC. The study focused on developing a web-based nomogram for preoperative prediction of MVI in HBV-HCC.
Materials and Methods: 173 HBV-HCC patients from 2017 to 2022 with complete preoperative clinical data and Gadopentetate dimeglumine-enhanced magnetic resonance images were randomly divided into two groups for the purpose of model training and validation, using a ratio of 7:3. MRI signatures were extracted by pyradiomics and the deep neural network, 3D ResNet. Clinical factors, blood-cell-inflammation markers, and MRI signatures selected by LASSO were incorporated into the predictive nomogram. The evaluation of the predictive accuracy involved assessing the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC), the concordance index (C-index), along with analyses of calibration and decision curves.
Results: Inflammation marker, neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR), was positively correlated with independent MRI radiomics risk factors for MVI. The performance of prediction model combined serum AFP, AST, NLR, 15 radiomics features and 7 deep features was better than clinical and radiomics models. The combined model achieved C-index values of 0.926 and 0.917, with AUCs of 0.911 and 0.907, respectively.
Conclusion: NLR showed a positive correlation with MRI radiomics and deep learning features. The nomogram, incorporating NLR and MRI features, accurately predicted individualized MVI risk preoperatively.
Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
(Copyright © 2024 Zhong, Chen, Ding, Ou, Zhang and Weng.)