CT-based Intra-thrombus and Peri-thrombus Radiomics for Prediction of Prognosis After Endovascular Thrombectomy: A Retrospective Study Across Two Centers

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Complications from endovascular thrombectomy (EVT) can negatively affect clinical outcomes, making the development of a more precise and objective prediction model essential. This research aimed to assess the effectiveness of radiomic features derived from pre-surgical CT scans in predicting the prognosis post- EVT in acute ischemic stroke patients.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: This investigation included 336 acute ischemic stroke patients from two medical centers, spanning from March 2018 to March 2024. The participants were split into a training cohort of 161 patients and a validation cohort of 175 patients. Patient outcomes were rated with the mRS: 0-2 for good, 3-6 for poor. A total of 428 radiomic features were derived from intra-thrombus and peri-thrombus regions in non-contrast CT and CT angiography images. Feature selection was conducted using a least absolute shrinkage and selection operator regression model. The efficacy of eight different supervised learning models was assessed using the area under the curve (AUC) of the receiver operating characteristic curve.

RESULTS: Among all models tested in the validation cohort, the logistic regression algorithm for combined model achieved the highest AUC (0.87, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.81 to 0.92), outperforming other algorithms. The combined use of radiomic features from both the intra-thrombus and peri-thrombus regions significantly enhanced diagnostic accuracy over models using features from a single region (0.81 vs 0.70, 0.77), highlighting the benefit of integrating data from both regions for improved prediction.

CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest that a combined radiomics model based on CT imaging serves as a potent approach to assessing the prognosis following EVT. The logistic regression model, in particular, proved to be both effective and stable, offering critical insights for the management of stroke.

ABBREVIATIONS: AUC=area under the curve; EVT=endovascular thrombectomy; KNN=k-nearest neighbors; LASSO=least absolute shrinkage and selection operator; LightGBM=Light Gradient Boosting Machine; LR=logistic regression; MLP=multi-layer perceptron; RF=random forest; SVM=support vector machine; XGBoost=extreme gradient boosting.