Establishment of a new non-invasive imaging prediction model for liver metastasis in colon cancer.

The aim of this study was to develop and validate a new non-invasive artificial intelligence (AI) model based on preoperative computed tomography (CT) data to predict the presence of liver metastasis (LM) in colon cancer (CC). A total of forty-eight eligible CC patients were enrolled, including twenty-four patients with LM and twenty-four patients without LM. Six clinical factors and one hundred and fifty-two tumor image features extracted from CT data were utilized to develop three models: clinical, radiomics, and hybrid (a combination of clinical and radiomics features) using support vector machines with 5-fold cross-validation. The performance of each model was evaluated in terms of accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, and area under the curve (AUC). For the radiomics model, a total of four image features utilized to construct the model resulting in an accuracy of 83.87% for training and 79.50% for validation. The clinical model that employed two selected clinical variables had an accuracy of 69.82% and 69.50% for training and validation, respectively. The hybrid model that combined relevant image features and clinical variables improved accuracy of both training (90.63%) and validation (85.50%) sets. In terms of AUC, hybrid (0.96; 0.87) and radiomics models (0.91; 0.85) demonstrated a significant improvement compared with the clinical model (0.71; 0.69), and the hybrid model had the best prediction performance. In conclusion, the AI model developed using preoperative conventional CT data can accurately predict LM in CC patients without additional procedures. Furthermore, combining image features with clinical characteristics greatly improved the model's prediction performance. We have thus generated a promising tool that allows guidance and individualized surveillance of CC patients with high risks of LM.