Comparative Analysis for the Distinction of Chromophobe Renal Cell Carcinoma from Renal Oncocytoma in Computed Tomography Imaging using Machine Learning Radiomics Analysis

Background: ChRCC and RO are two types of rarely occurring renal tumors that are difficult to distinguish from one another based on morphological features alone. They differ in prognosis, with ChRCC capable of progressing and metastasizing, but RO is benign. This means discrimination of the two tumors is of crucial importance.

Objectives: The purpose of this research was to develop and comprehensively evaluate predictive models that can discriminate between ChRCC and RO tumors using Computed Tomography (CT) scans and ML-Radiomics texture analysis methods.

Methods: Data were obtained from 78 pathologically confirmed renal masses, scanned at two institutions. Data from the two institutions were combined to form a third set resulting in three data cohorts, i.e., cohort 1, 2 and combined. Contrast-enhanced scans were used and the axial cross-sectional slices of each tumor were extracted from the 3D data using a semi-automatic segmentation technique for both 2D and 3D scans. Radiomics features were extracted before and after applying filters and the dimensions of the radiomic features reduced using the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) method. Synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) was applied to avoid class imbalance. Five ML algorithms were used to train models for predictive classification and evaluated using 5-fold cross-validation.

Results: The number of selected features with good model performance was 20, 40 and 6 for cohorts 1, 2 and combined, respectively. The best model performance in cohorts 1, 2 and combined had an excellent Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 1.00 ± 0.000, 1.00 ± 0.000 and 0.87 ± 0.073, respectively.

Conclusions: ML-based radiomics signatures are potentially useful for distinguishing ChRCC and RO tumors, with a reliable level of performance for both 2D and 3D scanning.