Infection and drug resistance
Fusing Radiomics and Ultrasonic Features: A Superior Nomogram for Diagnosing Cervical Tuberculous Lymphadenitis
By Liu X, Liu Y, Sun F and 6 others.
Abstract
Objective
This study aims to develop and validate a radiomics-based nomogram derived from ultrasound (US) images for differentiating cervical tuberculous lymphadenitis (CTL) from non-CTL in the pre-biopsy setting.
Methods
A retrospective analysis was conducted on 287 patients with biopsy-confirmed cervical lymphadenopathy (116 CTL and 171 non-CTL), all of whom underwent conventional US examinations. The US images were randomly split into training and validation cohorts at a 7:3 ratio. Radiomics features were extracted from manually delineated regions of interest (ROIs) using PyRadiomics. Features with intra- and inter-observer ICC > 0.75 were retained. Significant features were selected via t-test and LASSO regression. A radiomics score (radscore) was calculated, and a nomogram was constructed by integrating the radscore with US features (necrosis, heterogeneous, and posterior enhancement). Diagnostic performance was evaluated using ROC curves, calibration curves, decision curve analysis (DCA), and the Hosmer-Lemeshow goodness-of-fit test.