Deep learning radiomics based on contrast enhanced computed tomography predicts microvascular invasion and survival outcome in early stage hepatocellular carcinoma

To evaluate the performance of a deep learning (DL)-based radiomics strategy on contrast-enhanced computed tomography (CT) to predict microvascular invasion (MVI) status and clinical outcomes, recurrence-free survival (RFS) and overall survival (OS) in patients with early stage hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) receiving surgical resection.All 283 eligible patients were included retrospectively between January 2008 and December 2015, and assigned into the training cohort (n = 198) and the testing cohort (n = 85). We extracted radiomics features via handcrafted radiomics analysis manually and DL analysis of pretrained convolutional neural networks via transfer learning automatically. Support vector machine was adopted as the classifier. A clinical-radiological model for MVI status integrated significant clinical features and the radiological signature generated from the radiological model with the optimal area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUC) in the testing cohort. Otherwise, DL-based prognostic models were constructed in prediction of recurrence and mortality via Cox proportional hazard analysis.The clinical-radiological model for MVI represented an AUC of 0.909, accuracy of 96.47%, sensitivity of 90.91%, specificity of 97.30%, positive predictive value of 83.33%, and negative predictive value of 98.63% in the testing cohort. The clinical-radiological models for identification of RFS and OS outperformed prediction performance of the clinical model or the DL signature alone. The DL-based integrated model for prognostication showed great predictive value with significant classification and discrimination abilities after validation.The integrated DL-based radiomics models achieved accurate preoperative prediction of MVI status, and might facilitate predicting tumor recurrence and mortality in order to optimize clinical decisions for patients with early stage HCC.