Journal Article

Differential diagnosis of pancreatic serous cystadenoma and mucinous cystadenoma: utility of textural features in combination with morphological characteristics

Yang, Jing, Ma, Xuelei, Guo, Xinli, Zhang, Hao, Zhang, Weiwei, Xu, Hui, Song, Jinen

2019

Overview

Background Texture analysis of medical images has been reported to be a reliable method for differential diagnosis of neoplasms. This study was to investigate the performance of textural features and the combined performance of textural features and morphological characteristics in the differential diagnosis of pancreatic serous and mucinous cystadenomas. Methods We retrospectively reviewed 59 patients with pancreatic serous cystadenoma and 32 patients with pancreatic mucinous cystadenoma at our hospital. A three-dimensional region of interest (ROI) around the margin of the lesion was drawn manually in the CT images of each patient, and textural parameters were retrieved from the ROI. Textural features were extracted using the LifeX software. The least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) method was applied to select the textural features. The differential diagnostic capabilities of morphological features, textural features, and their combination were evaluated using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis, and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) was used as the main indicator. The diagnostic accuracy based on the AUC value is defined as follows: 0.9–1.0, excellent; 0.8–0.9, good; 0.7–0.8, moderate; 0.6–0.7, fair; 0.5–0.6, poor. Results In the differential diagnosis of pancreatic serous and mucinous cystadenomas, the combination of morphological characteristics and textural features (AUC 0.893, 95% CI 0.816–0.970) is better than morphological characteristics (AUC 0.783, 95% CI 0.665–0.900) or textural features (AUC 0.777, 95% CI 0.673–0.880) alone. Conclusions In conclusion, our preliminary results highlighted the potential of CT texture analysis in discriminating pancreatic serous cystadenoma from mucinous cystadenoma. Furthermore, the combination of morphological characteristics and textural features can significantly improve the diagnostic performance, which may provide a reliable method for selecting patients with surgical intervention indications in consideration of the different treatment principles of the two diseases.

• Publisher: BioMed Central,BioMed Central Ltd,Springer Nature B.V,BMC
• Subject: Abdomen / Accuracy / Adolescent / Adult / Age / Aged / Biomarkers / Biomedical and Life Sciences / Biomedicine / Calcification / Cancer Research / CAT scans / Child / Child, Preschool / China / Cystadenoma, Mucinous - diagnosis / Cystadenoma, Mucinous - diagnostic imaging / Cystadenoma, Mucinous - pathology / Cystadenoma, Serous - diagnosis / Cystadenoma, Serous - diagnostic imaging / Cystadenoma, Serous - pathology / Cysts / Diagnosis / Diagnosis, Differential / Diagnostic imaging / Differential diagnosis / Female / Health Promotion and Disease Prevention / Humans / Male / Medical imaging equipment / Medicine/Public Health / Middle Aged / Morphology / Mucinous cystadenoma / Multidetector Computed Tomography / Oncology / Pancreas / Pancreatic Neoplasms - diagnosis / Pancreatic Neoplasms - diagnostic imaging / Pancreatic Neoplasms - pathology / Patients / Physical characteristics / Research Article / Retrospective Studies / Serous cystadenoma / Surgery / Surgical Oncology / Tomography / Tumors / Young Adult