Evaluation on the Hepatic Functional Reserve of Cirrhotic Patients based on CT Radiomics Characteristics

Objective: To explore the value of CT radiomics characteristics in evaluating hepatic functional reserve of patients with liver cirrhosis. Methods: A total of 121 patients with clinically confirmed liver cirrhosis were retrospectively collected, who were graded as A, B and C according to Child-Pugh standard. 51 cases were grade A (group A) and 70 cases were grade B and C (group B). All patients underwent non-contrast and contrast enhanced CT scan using GE Discovery CT 750 HD scanner. Enhanced CT images of portal venous phase were selected, and the whole liver was delineated at the level of the left portal vein by 2 radiologists using Shukun Radiomics V94 software. Intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) was applied to test the inter-group consistency of the results obtained by the 2 radiologists. All patients were randomly divided into the training set and the validation set at a ratio of 7∶3, and the whole liver was performed extraction process for radiomics characteristics. After dimensionality reduction, radiomics characteristics were acquired and the model was established by Logistic Regression (LR). Area Under ROC Curve (AUC) was used to evaluate the performance of the model. Results: The consistency test results of image delineation by two radiologists turned out well and the ICC were greater than 0.75. Finally, 17 radiomics characteristics were used to establish the evaluation model for hepatic functional reserve of patients with liver cirrhosis. The AUC of the training set was 0.84 while the accuracy, sensitivity and specificity was 0.78, 0.79, and 0.77, respectively. The AUC of the validation set was 0.77 while the accuracy, sensitivity and specificity was 0.71, 0.76, and 0.65, respectively. Conclusion: CT radiomics characteristics could be used to evaluate the hepatic functional reserve of patients with liver cirrhosis.