The value of various peritumoral radiomic features in differentiating the invasiveness of adenocarcinoma manifesting as ground-glass nodules

To evaluate the ability of CT radiomic features extracted from peritumoral parenchyma of 2 mm and 5 mm distinguishing invasive adenocarcinoma (IAC) from adenocarcinoma in situ (AIS)/minimally invasive adenocarcinoma (MIA). For this retrospective study, 121 lung adenocarcinomas appearing as ground-glass nodules on thin-section CT were evaluated. Quantitative radiomic features were extracted from the peritumoral parenchymal region of 2 mm and 5 mm on CT imaging, and the radiomic models of External2 and External5 were constructed. The ROC curves were used to evaluate the performance of different models. Differences between the AUCs were evaluated using DeLong’s method. The radiomic scores of IAC were statistically higher than those of MIA/AIS in both the External2 and External5 models. The AUCs of the External2 and External5 models were 0.882, 0.778 in the training cohort and 0.888, 0.804 in the validation cohort, respectively. The AUC of the External2 model was not statistically different from the External5 model both in the training cohort (p = 0.116) and validation cohort (p = 0.423). The radiomic features extracted from the peritumoral region of 2 mm and 5 mm at thin-section CT showed good predictive values to differentiate the IAC from AIS/MIA. The radiomic features from the peritumoral region of 5 mm provide no additional benefit in distinguishing IAC from MIA/AIS than that of the 2 mm region. • The radiomic models from various peritumoral lung parenchyma were developed and validated to predict invasiveness of adenocarcinoma. • The peritumoral parenchyma of lung adenocarcinoma may contain useful information. • Radiomics from peritumoral lung parenchyma of 5 mm provides no added efficiency of the prediction for invasiveness of lung adenocarcinoma.