Liver imaging features by convolutional neural network to predict the metachronous liver metastasis in stage I-III colorectal cancer patients based on preoperative abdominal CT scan

The imaging features combined with clinical information improved the performance compared to the standardized prediction model using only clinical information. The liver imaging features generated by CNN may have the potential to predict liver metastasis. These results suggest that even though there were no liver metastasis during the primary colectomy, the features of liver imaging can impose characteristics that could be predictive for metachronous liver metastasis.