Differentiating between benign (non-cancerous) and malignant (cancerous) pulmonary nodules is a critical step in determining appropriate patient management and cancer treatment planning. Conventional evaluation using chest computed tomography (CT) relies on visual inspection of features such as size, shape, and borders; however, benign and malignant nodules frequently exhibit overlapping characteristics, which often necessitates invasive biopsy procedures.
Radiomics is an emerging analytical technique that extracts high-dimensional quantitative data from standard medical images, including tissue texture, density patterns, and complex spatial features, that cannot be detected by visual inspection alone.
The purpose of this observational study is to evaluate the utility of CT-derived radiomics combined with machine learning algorithms to non-invasively differentiate between benign and malignant pulmonary nodules. Researchers will extract quantitative imaging features from chest CT scans of patients presenting with pulmonary nodules measuring less than 5 cm to train and validate predictive machine learning models, with the goal of improving non-invasive diagnostic accuracy and reducing unnecessary biopsy procedures.