Real-World and Clinical Trial Validation of a Deep Learning Radiomic Biomarker for PD-(L)1 Immune Checkpoint Inhibitor Response in Advanced Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer.

Purpose: This study developed and validated a novel deep learning radiomic biomarker to estimate response to immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) therapy in advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) using real-world data (RWD) and clinical trial data.

Materials And Methods: Retrospective RWD of 1,829 patients with advanced NSCLC treated with PD-(L)1 ICIs were collected from 10 academic and community institutions in the United States and Europe. The RWD included data sets for discovery (Data Set A-Discovery, n = 1,173) and independent test (Data Set B, n = 458). A radiomic pipeline, containing a deep learning feature extractor and a survival model, generated the computed tomography (CT) response score (CTRS) applied to the pretreatment routine CT/positron emission tomography (PET)-CT scan. An enhanced CTRS (eCTRS) also incorporated age, sex, treatment line, and lesion annotations. Performance was evaluated against progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS). Biomarker generalizability was further evaluated using a secondary analysis of a prospective clinical trial (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT02573259) evaluating the PD-1 inhibitor sasanlimab in second or later line of treatment (Data Set C, n = 54).

Results: In RWD Test Data Set B, the CTRS identified patients with a high probability of response to ICI with a PFS hazard ratio (HR) of 0.46 (95% CI, 0.26 to 0.82) and an OS HR of 0.50 (95% CI, 0.28 to 0.92) in the first-line ICI monotherapy cohort, after adjustment for baseline covariates including the PD-L1 tumor proportion score. In Clinical Trial Data Set C, the CTRS demonstrated an adjusted PFS HR of 1.03 (95% CI, 0.43 to 2.47) and an OS HR of 0.33 (95% CI, 0.14 to 0.91). The CTRS and eCTRS outperformed traditional imaging biomarkers of lesion size in PFS and OS for RWD Test Data Set B and in OS for the Clinical Trial Data Set.

Conclusion: The study developed and validated a deep learning radiomic biomarker using pretreatment routine CT/PET-CT scans to identify ICI benefit in advanced NSCLC.