Abstract
To compare and analyze the diagnostic value of different enhancement stages in distinguishing low and high nuclear grade clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) based on enhanced computed tomography (CT) images by building machine learning classifiers. A total of 51 patients (Dateset1, including 41 low-grade and 10 high-grade) and 27 patients (Independent Dateset2, including 16 low-grade and 11 high-grade) with pathologically proven ccRCC were enrolled in this retrospective study. Radiomic features were extracted from the corticomedullary phase (CMP), nephrographic phase (NP), and excretory phase (EP) CT images, and selected using the recursive feature elimination cross-validation (RFECV) algorithm, the group differences were assessed using T-test and Mann-Whitney U test for continuous variables. The support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), XGBoost (XGB), VGG11, ResNet18, and GoogLeNet classifiers are established to distinguish low-grade and high-grade ccRCC. The classifiers based on CT images of NP (Dateset1, RF: AUC = 0.82 ± 0.05, ResNet18: AUC = 0.81 ± 0.02; Dateset2, XGB: AUC = 0.95 ± 0.02, ResNet18: AUC = 0.87 ± 0.07) obtained the best performance and robustness in distinguishing low-grade and high-grade ccRCC, while the EP-based classifier performance in poorer results. The CT images of enhanced phase NP had the best performance in diagnosing low and high nuclear grade ccRCC. Firstorder_Kurtosis and firstorder_90Percentile feature play a vital role in the classification task.