Assessing EGFR gene mutation status in non-small cell lung cancer with imaging features from PET/CT.

Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate whether quantitative and qualitative features extracted from PET/computed tomography (CT) can be used as imaging biomarkers for evaluating epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutation status in non-small cell lung cancer patients.

Methods: Eighty patients with stage II and III non-small cell lung cancer from January 2017 to December 2017 were included in this study. All patients underwent PET/CT examination before operation. Patients with 30 EGFR positive and 50 EGFR negative were confirmed by pathological verification and gene detection. Least absolute shrinkage and selection operator was used for analysis and selection of imaging features. Support vector machine was used to classify EGFR positive/negative using the selected features. Ten-fold cross validation was used to estimate the accuracy.

Results: A total of 512 quantitative features (radiomic features) were extracted from PET/CT (256 for PET and 256 for CT), and 12 qualitative features (semantic features) were extracted from CT. A total of 35 features were finally retained after least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (31 quantitative features and 4 qualitative features). The 35 selected features were significantly associated with EGFR mutation status. A predictive model was built using PET/CT data. Its performance was revealed as 0.953 using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve.

Conclusion: A predictive model using PET/CT images might be used to detect EGFR mutation status in non-small cell lung cancer patients.