ViT‐based quantification of intratumoral heterogeneity for predicting the early recurrence in HCC following multiple ablation

Abstract Objectives This study aimed to develop a quantitative intratumoral heterogeneity (ITH) model for assessing the risk of early recurrence (ER) in pre‐treatment multimodal imaging for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients undergoing ablation treatments. Methods This multi‐centre study enrolled 633 HCC patients who underwent ultrasound‐guided local ablation between January 2015 and September 2022. Among them, 422, 85, 57 and 69 patients underwent radiofrequency ablation (RFA), microwave ablation (MWA), laser ablation (LA) and irreversible electroporation (IRE) ablation, respectively. Vision‐Transformer‐based quantitative ITH (ViT‐Q‐ITH) features were extracted from the US and MRI sequences. Multivariable logistic regression analysis was used to identify variables associated with ER. A combined model integrated clinic‐radiologic and ViT‐Q‐ITH scores. The prediction performance was evaluated concerning calibration, clinical usefulness and discrimination. Results The final training cohort and internal validation cohort included 318 patients and 83 patients, respectively, who underwent RFA and MWA. The three external testing cohorts comprised of 106 patients treated with RFA, 57 patients treated with LA and 69 patients who underwent IRE ablation. The combined model showed excellent predictive performance for ER in the training (AUC: .99, 95% CI: .99–1.00), internal validation (AUC: .86, 95% CI: .78–.94), external testing (AUC: .83, 95% CI: .73–.92), LA (AUC: .84, 95% CI: .73–.95) and IRE (AUC: .82, 95% CI: .72–.93) cohorts, respectively. Decision curve analysis further affirmed the clinical utility of the combined model. Conclusions The multimodal‐based model, incorporating clinic‐radiologic factors and ITH features, demonstrated superior performance in predicting ER among early‐stage HCC patients undergoing different ablation modalities.