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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Immunol.

Sec. Cancer Immunity and Immunotherapy

This article is part of the Research TopicNovel Immune Markers and Predictive Models for Diagnosis, Immunotherapy and Prognosis in Lung Cancer​​​​​​​View all 12 articles

The Capability of Deep-radiomics to Predict Pathological Response to Neoadjuvant Immunochemotherapy in Non–small Cell Lung Cancer: A Retrospective Multicenter Study

Provisionally accepted
Yuanxin  YeYuanxin Ye1Yuchi  TianYuchi Tian2Lingling  WangLingling Wang1Zihan  XiZihan Xi1Yangfan  ZhangYangfan Zhang3Tong  ZhouTong Zhou4Zhenhua  ZhaoZhenhua Zhao4Yifeng  ZhengYifeng Zheng3Xiaoyun  LiangXiaoyun Liang2*Haitao  JiangHaitao Jiang1*
  • 1Zhejiang Cancer Hospital, Hangzhou, China
  • 2Neusoft Medical Systems Co Ltd, Shenyang, China
  • 3Huzhou Central Hospital, Huzhou, China
  • 4Shaoxing People's Hospital, Shaoxing, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Background To establish a predictive model that combines radiomics, deep learning and clinical features for predicting the pathological complete response (pCR) of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients after neoadjuvant immunochemotherapy (NIT). Methods We retrospectively collected patients from three centers(split into training, internal testing and external testing cohorts). In this study, tumor segmentation was performed on chest CT images before (pre-NIT) and after (post-NIT) neoadjuvant therapy. The radiomics features were extracted from pre-NIT and post-NIT image. Deep learning (DL) features were extracted from the post-NIT images. The most meaningful features were selected using the mRMR and LASSO. A logistic regression classifier was then applied to create a classification model to predict pCR or non-pCR. The predicted probability were referred to as the Rad-scores and Deep-scores. Finally, Rad-scores, Deep-scores, and meaningful clinical features were fused to build a combined model. Results A total of 178 patients were enrolled in the current study. In conventional radiomics, the efficacy of post-NIT model was better than the pre-NIT. In delta radiomics model, delta1 had the best efficacy. Subsequently, the post-NIT and delta1 features were further constructed as the combined model 1 with AUCs of 0.939 and 0.849, respectively. iRECIST was combined with the radiomics and the DL features to establish the combined model 2, which achieved the best performance among all the models, with AUCs of 0.955(training), 0.882(In-testing), and 0.839(Ex-testing). 2 Conclusions Our results demonstrated that combination of three dimensional features can provide complementary information to predict pCR more accurately.

Keywords: deep learning, Delta-radiomics, Neoadjuvant immunochemotherapy, NSCLC, Pathological complete response

Received: 17 Dec 2025; Accepted: 16 Feb 2026.

Copyright: © 2026 Ye, Tian, Wang, Xi, Zhang, Zhou, Zhao, Zheng, Liang and Jiang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence:
Xiaoyun Liang
Haitao Jiang

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