Cardiac Computed Tomography Radiomics-Based Approach for the Detection of Left Ventricular Remodeling in Patients with Arterial Hypertension

The aim of the study is to verify the feasibility of a radiomics based approach for the detection of LV remodeling in patients with arterial hypertension. Cardiac Computed Tomography (CCT) and clinical data of patients with and without history of arterial hypertension were collected. In one image per patient, on a 4-chamber view, left ventricle (LV) was segmented using a polygonal region of interest by two radiologists in consensus. A total of 377 radiomics features per region of interest were extracted. After dataset splitting (70:30 ratio), eleven classification models were tested for the discrimination of patients with and without arterial hypertension based on radiomics data. An Ensemble Machine Learning (EML) score was calculated from models with an accuracy >60%. Boruta algorithm was used to extract radiomic features discriminating between patients with and without history of hypertension. Pearson correlation coefficient was used to assess correlation between EML score and septum width in patients included in the test set. EML showed an accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of 0.7. Correlation between EML score and LV septum width was 0.53 (p-value < 0.0001). We considered LV septum width as a surrogate of myocardial remodeling in our population, and this is the reason why we can consider the EML score as a possible tool to evaluate myocardial remodeling. A CCT-based radiomic approach for the identification of LV remodeling is possible in patients with past medical history of arterial hypertension.