Radiomics model of CTE can detect inflammatory activity in intestinal Crohn's disease

Abstract

Objectives

To investigate the diagnostic value of a computed tomography enterography (CTE)-based radiomics model (RM) in the detection of active inflamXGmation in patients with intestinal Crohn's disease (CD).

Methods

CTE images and clinical data of 105 patients with pathologically diagnosed intestinal CD were retrospectively analyzed. Patients were divided into non-mild and moderate-severe activity groups based on histopathology. Among them, 84 cases were randomly divided into the training group (43 positive and 41 negative in an 8:2 ratio) and 21 into the experimental group (11 positive and 10 negative). All lesion areas on the venous-phase CTE image were delineated manually using ITK-Snap, features were extracted, and DARWIN software was used to reduce feature dimensionality. A binary RM using eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBOOST) was established to assess the test set, and sensitivity, specificity, and the area under the curve (AUC) were calculated. Finally, the AUC was used to evaluate the diagnostic efficacy and optimal diagnostic threshold of RM for active CD.

Results

In the training set, the AUC for RM to distinguish between non-mild and moderate-severe activity was 0.93, with a sensitivity of 90.2% and specificity of 83.7%. In the validation set, the AUC was 0.86, with a sensitivity of 90% and a specificity of 81.8%.

Conclusion

An imaging-omics model based on CTE can effectively evaluate CD activity.