Nomogram model for the diagnosis of solitary nodular pulmonary mucinous adenocarcinoma

The objective of this study was to develop a nomogram model based on the natural progression of tumor and other radiological features to discriminate between solitary nodular pulmonary mucinous adenocarcinoma and non-mucinous adenocarcinomas. A retrospective analysis was conducted on 15,655 cases of lung adenocarcinoma diagnosed at our institution between January 2010 and June 2023. Primary nodular invasive mucinous adenocarcinomas and non-mucinous adenocarcinomas with at least two preoperative CT scans were included. These patients were randomly assigned to training and validation sets. Univariate and multivariate analyses were employed to compare tumor growth rates and clinical radiological characteristics between the two groups in the training set. A nomogram model was constructed based on the results of multivariate analysis. The diagnostic value of the model was evaluated in both the training and validation sets using calibration curves and receiver operating characteristic curves (ROC). The study included 174 patients, with 58 cases of mucinous adenocarcinoma and 116 cases of non-mucinous adenocarcinoma. The nomogram model incorporated the maximum tumor diameter, the consolidation/tumor ratio (CTR), and the specific growth rate (SGR) to generate individual scores for each patient, which were then accumulated to obtain a total score indicative of the likelihood of developing mucinous or non-mucinous adenocarcinoma. The model demonstrated excellent discriminative ability with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.784 for the training set and 0.833 for the testing set. The nomogram model developed in this study, integrating SGR with other radiological and clinical parameters, provides a valuable and accurate tool for differentiating between solitary nodular pulmonary mucinous adenocarcinoma and non-mucinous adenocarcinomas. This prognostic model offers a robust and objective basis for personalized management of patients with pulmonary adenocarcinomas.