Quantifying invasiveness of clinical stage IA lung adenocarcinoma with computed tomography texture features

Objectives: The study objectives were to establish and validate a nomogram for pathological invasiveness prediction in clinical stage IA lung adenocarcinoma and to help identify those potentially unsuitable for sublobar resection-based computed tomography texture features. Method: Patients with clinical stage IA lung adenocarcinoma who underwent surgery at Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital between January 2015 and October 2018 were retrospectively reviewed. All surgically resected nodules were pathologically classified into less-invasive and invasive cohorts. Each nodule was manually segmented, and its computerized texture features were extracted. Clinicopathological and computed tomographic texture features were compared between 2 cohorts. A nomogram for distinguishing the pathological invasiveness was established and validated. Results: Among 428 enrolled patients, 249 were diagnosed with invasive pathological subtypes. Smoking status (odds ratio, 2.906; 95% confidence interval, 1.285-6.579; P = .011), mean computed tomography attenuation value (odds ratio, 1.005, 95% confidence interval, 1.002-1.007; P<.001), and entropy (odds ratio, 8.536, 95% confidence interval, 3.478-20.951; P<.001) were identified as independent predictors for pathological invasiveness by multivariate logistics regression analysis. The nomogram showed good calibration (P = .182) with an area under the curve of 0.849 when validated with testing set data. Decision curve analysis indicated the potentially clinical usefulness of the model with respect to treat-all or treat-none scenario. Compared with intraoperative frozen-section, the nomogram performed better in pathological invasiveness diagnosis (area under the curve, 0.815 vs 0.670; P = .00095). Conclusions: We established and validated a nomogram to compute the probability of invasiveness of clinical stage IA lung adenocarcinoma with great calibration, which may contribute to decisions related to resection extent.