Dual-Region Slice Aggregation for CT-Based Renal Tumor Classification

Yuan Liang, Sourav Bhattacharjee, Abraham Campbell

Clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) is the most common kidney cancer in adults. We present a region-aware architecture for CT-based ccRCC classification. Tumor and 0--10 mm peritumoral context are pooled separately from shared frozen DINOv3 feature maps. A shared position-aware slice aggregator precedes fixed training-only principal component analysis (PCA). The resulting representations are fused with radiomics using two scalar feature gates. Evaluation on KiTS23 and 111 external cases yields internal test and external AUCs of 0.8078\pm0.0154 and 0.9094\pm0.0015. Compared with matched single-tumor readout, mean AUC increases by 1.50 and 2.34 percentage points, respectively. Early-PCA and reconstruction controls yield lower internal mean AUCs, while external AUC is similar for early and late PCA. These findings highlight the joint role of regional readout and slice aggregation in adapting frozen visual features to renal CT.