Jing Liu

Objectives: The primary objective of this study was to identify whether patients with prostate cancer (PCa) could progress to denervation-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) after 12 months of hormone therapy. Methods: A total of 96 PCa patients with baseline clinical data who underwent multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) between September 2018 and September 2022 were included in this retrospective study. Patients were classified as progressing or not progressing to CRPC on the basis of their outcome after 12 months of hormone therapy. A dense multimodal fusion artificial intelligence (Dense-MFAI) model was constructed by incorporating a squeeze-and-excitation block and a spatial pyramid pooling layer into a dense convolutional network (DenseNet), as well as integrating the eXtreme Gradient Boosting machine learning algorithm. The accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, receiver operating characteristic curves, area under the curve (AUC) and confusion matrices were used as classification performance metrics. Results: The Dense-MFAI model demonstrated an accuracy of 94.2%, with an AUC of 0.945, when predicting the progression of patients with PCa to CRPC after 12 months of hormone therapy. The experimental validation demonstrated that combining radiomics feature mapping with baseline clinical characteristics significantly improved the model’s classification performance, confirming the importance of multimodal data. Conclusions: The Dense-MFAI model proposed in this study has the ability to more accurately predict whether a PCa patient could progress to CRPC. This model can assist urologists in developing the most appropriate treatment plan and prognostic measures.

Background: Functioning and non-functioning adrenocortical adenoma are two subtypes of benign adrenal adenoma, and their differential diagnosis is crucial. Current diagnostic procedures use an invasive method, adrenal venous sampling, for endocrinologic assessment. Methods: This study proposes establishing an accurate differential model for subtyping adrenal adenoma using computed tomography (CT) radiomic features and machine learning (ML) methods. Dataset 1 (289 patients with adrenal adenoma) was collected to develop the models, and Dataset 2 (54 patients) was utilized for external validation. Cuboids containing the lesion were cropped from the non-contrast, arterial, and venous phase CT images, and 1,967 features were extracted from each cuboid. Ten discriminative features were selected from each phase or the combined phases. Random forest, support vector machine, logistic regression (LR), Gradient Boosting Machine, and eXtreme Gradient Boosting were used to establish prediction models. Results: The highest accuracies were 72.7%, 72.7%, and 76.1% in the arterial, venous, and non-contrast phases, respectively, when using radiomic features alone with the ML classifier of LR. When features from the three CT phases were combined, the accuracy of LR reached 83.0%. After adding clinical information, the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve increased for all the machine learning methods except for LR. In Dataset 2, the accuracy of LR was the highest, reaching 77.8%. Conclusion: The radiomic features of the lesion in three-phase CT images can potentially suggest the functioning or non-functioning nature of adrenal adenoma. The resulting radiomic models can be a non-invasive, low-cost, and rapid method of minimizing unnecessary testing in asymptomatic patients with incidentally discovered adrenal adenoma.