Role of radiomic analysis of [ 18 F]fluoromethylcholine PET/CT in predicting biochemical recurrence in a cohort of intermediate and high risk prostate cancer patients at initial staging.

AIM: To study the feasibility of radiomic analysis of baseline [18 F]fluoromethylcholine positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) for the prediction of biochemical recurrence (BCR) in a cohort of intermediate and high-risk prostate cancer (PCa) patients.

MATERIAL AND METHODS: Seventy-four patients were prospectively collected. We analyzed three prostate gland (PG) segmentations (i.e., PGwhole : whole PG; PG41% : prostate having standardized uptake value - SUV > 0.41*SUVmax; PG2.5 : prostate having SUV > 2.5) together with three SUV discretization steps (i.e., 0.2, 0.4, and 0.6). For each segmentation/discretization step, we trained a logistic regression model to predict BCR using radiomic and/or clinical features.

RESULTS: The median baseline prostate-specific antigen was 11 ng/mL, the Gleason score was > 7 for 54% of patients, and the clinical stage was T1/T2 for 89% and T3 for 9% of patients. The baseline clinical model achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.73. Performances improved when clinical data were combined with radiomic features, in particular for PG2.5 and 0.4 discretization, for which the median test AUC was 0.78.

CONCLUSION: Radiomics reinforces clinical parameters in predicting BCR in intermediate and high-risk PCa patients. These first data strongly encourage further investigations on the use of radiomic analysis to identify patients at risk of BCR.

CLINICAL RELEVANCE STATEMENT: The application of AI combined with radiomic analysis of [18 F]fluoromethylcholine PET/CT images has proven to be a promising tool to stratify patients with intermediate or high-risk PCa in order to predict biochemical recurrence and tailor the best treatment options.

KEY POINTS: • Stratification of patients with intermediate and high-risk prostate cancer at risk of biochemical recurrence before initial treatment would help determine the optimal curative strategy. • Artificial intelligence combined with radiomic analysis of [18 F]fluorocholine PET/CT images allows prediction of biochemical recurrence, especially when radiomic features are complemented with patients' clinical information (highest median AUC of 0.78). • Radiomics reinforces the information of conventional clinical parameters (i.e., Gleason score and initial prostate-specific antigen level) in predicting biochemical recurrence.