Development and Validation of a Preoperative Nomogram for Predicting Benign and Malignant Gallbladder Polypoid Lesions

PurposeThe purpose of this study was to develop and validate a preoperative nomogram of differentiating benign and malignant gallbladder polypoid lesions (GPs) combining clinical and radiomics features. MethodsThe clinical and imaging data of 195 GPs patients which were confirmed by pathology from April 2014 to May 2021 were reviewed. All patients were randomly divided into the training and testing cohorts. Radiomics features based on 3 sequences of contrast-enhanced computed tomography were extracted by the Pyradiomics package in python, and the nomogram further combined with clinical parameters was established by multiple logistic regression. The performance of the nomogram was evaluated by discrimination and calibration. ResultsAmong 195 GPs patients, 132 patients were pathologically benign, and 63 patients were malignant. To differentiate benign and malignant GPs, the combined model achieved an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.950 as compared to the radiomics model and clinical model with AUC of 0.929 and 0.925 in the training cohort, respectively. Further validation showed that the combined model contributes to better sensitivity and specificity in the training and testing cohorts by the same cutoff value, although the clinical model had an AUC of 0.943, which was higher than 0.942 of the combined model in the testing cohort. ConclusionThis study develops a nomogram based on the clinical and radiomics features for the highly effective differentiation and prediction of benign and malignant GPs before surgery.