Radiomics Model for Preoperative Prediction of Lymph Node Metastasis in Rectal Cancer after Neoadjuvant Chemoradiatherapy Therapy

Preoperative evaluation of lymph node metastasis in locally advanced rectal cancer remains a problem especially after neoadjuvant chemoradiatherapy treatment (NCT). This study proposed a MRI-based radiomics method to predict lymph node involvement in rectal after NCT. Beside the features from the tumor, features from the lymph nodes were also included for the construction of the radiomics model to increase the accuracy of prediction. 10-fold cross-validation among 300 patients produced ROC with average AUC=0.78. Independent validation with 118 patients produced ROC with AUC=0.81.