HIV-infected patients with opportunistic pulmonary infections misdiagnosed as lung cancers: the clinicoradiologic features and initial application of CT radiomics.

BACKGROUND

To characterize clinicoradiologic and radiomic features for identifying opportunistic pulmonary infections (OPIs) misdiagnosed as lung cancers in patients with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

METHODS

Twenty-four HIV-infected patients who were misdiagnosed with lung cancers on CT images and had OPIs confirmed by pathological examination or integration of clinical and laboratory findings and 49 HIV-infected patients with lung cancers confirmed pathologically were included. Semiautomated segmentation of the lesion was implemented with an in-house software. The lesion boundary was adjusted manually by radiologists. A total of 99 nonenhanced-CT-based radiomic features were then extracted with PyRadiomics. The clinicoradiologic and radiomic features were compared between the OPI and cancer groups.

RESULTS

In the OPI group, 19 patients (79.2%) had tuberculosis (TB) infections, 2 (8.3%) had nontuberculosis mycobacterium (NTM) infections, 2 (8.3%) had cryptococcus infections and 1 (4.2%) had a mixed infection of TB and NTM. There were significant differences in age, proportion of smokers, smoking index, highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) duration, CD4+ counts and CD4+/CD8+ ratio between the two groups (P=0.000, 0.012, 0.007, 0.002, 0.000, and 0.000, respectively). In peripheral-type lesions, the presence of pleural indentation was less common, and the presence of satellite lesions was more common in the OPI group (P=0.016 and 0.020, respectively). Four radiomic parameters of central-type lesions were significantly different, including large dependence high gray level emphasis (LDHGLE), skewness, inverse difference normalized (IDN) and kurtosis (P=0.008, 0.017, 0.017, and 0.017, respectively). However, neither CT features of central-type lesions nor radiomic parameters of peripheral-type lesions were significantly different between the two groups.

CONCLUSIONS

Clinicoradiologic features together with radiomics may help identify OPIs mimicking lung cancers in HIV-infected patients.