Stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) for early-stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) leads to recurrence in approximately 18% of patients. We aimed to extract the radiomic features, with which we predicted clinical outcomes and to establish predictive models. Patients with primary non-metastatic NSCLC who were treated with SBRT between 2002 and 2022 were retrospectively reviewed. The 358 primary tumors were randomly divided into a training cohort of 250 tumors and a validation cohort of 108 tumors. Clinical features and 744 radiomic features derived from primary tumor delineation on pre-treatment computed tomography were examined as prognostic factors of survival outcomes by univariate and multivariate analyses in the training cohort. Predictive models of survival outcomes were established from the results of the multivariate analysis in the training cohort. The selected radiomic features and prediction models were tested in a validation cohort. We found that one radiomic feature showed a significant difference in overall survival (OS) in the validation cohort (p = 0.044) and one predicting model could estimate OS time (mean: 37.8 months) similar to the real OS time (33.7 months). In this study, we identified one radiomic factor and one prediction model that can be widely used.
Keywords: non-small cell lung cancer; overall survival; radiomics; stereotactic body radiation therapy.