CT radiomics to differentiate between Wilms tumor and clear cell sarcoma of the kidney in children

Abstract

Background

To investigate the role of CT radiomics in distinguishing Wilms tumor (WT) from clear cell sarcoma of the kidney (CCSK) in pediatric patients.

Methods

We retrospectively enrolled 83 cases of WT and 33 cases of CCSK. These cases were randomly stratified into a training set ( n = 81) and a test set ( n = 35). Several imaging features from the nephrographic phase were analyzed, including the maximum tumor diameter, the ratio of the maximum CT value of the tumor solid portion to the mean CT value of the contralateral renal vein (CTmax/CT renal vein), and the presence of dilated peritumoral cysts. Radiomics features from corticomedullary phase were extracted, selected, and subsequently integrated into a logistic regression model. We evaluated the model's performance using the area under the curve (AUC), 95% confidence interval (CI), and accuracy.

Results

In the training set, there were statistically significant differences in the maximum tumor diameter ( P = 0.021) and the presence of dilated peritumoral cysts ( P = 0.005) between WT and CCSK, whereas in the test set, no statistically significant differences were observed ( P > 0.05). The radiomics model, constructed using four radiomics features, demonstrated strong performance in the training set with an AUC of 0.889 (95% CI: 0.811–0.967) and an accuracy of 0.864. Upon evaluation using fivefold cross-validation in the training set, the AUC remained high at 0.863 (95% CI: 0.774–0.952), with an accuracy of 0.852. In the test set, the radiomics model achieved an AUC of 0.792 (95% CI: 0.616–0.968) and an accuracy of 0.857.

Conclusion

CT radiomics proves to be diagnostically valuable for distinguishing between WT and CCSK in pediatric cases.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12880-023-01184-2.