CT radiomics to predict early hepatic recurrence after resection for intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma

Intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (IHC) is an aggressive liver cancer with a five-year survival rate of less than 10%. Surgery is the only curative treatment. However, most patients die of disease recurrence, with more than 50% recurring within 2 years. The liver is the most common site. Recurrence at liver within a short period after surgery is common and eventually leads to death. Currently, there is no way to assess the risk of early recurrence or death in these patients. Methods to predict these risks would help physicians select the best treatment plan for individual patients; patients at high risk of recurrence could be treated early or at the time of surgery with chemotherapy or radiation. Such changes in patient management would greatly impact patients' prospects of survival. The objective of the present study is to identify preoperative computed tomography (CT)-based quantitative imaging predictors of early hepatic recurrence. Two hundred fifty four texture features were extracted from CT-tumor and future liver remnant (FLR) along with tumor size. With features selected using minimum redundancy maximum relevance method and AdaBoost classifier, we obtained an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.78 using a 3-fold cross-validation for a cohort of 139 patients with IHC.