ObjectiveTo establish a machine learning-based radiomics model to differentiate between glioma and solitary brain metastasis from lung cancer and its subtypes, thereby achieving accurate preoperative classification.Materials and methodsA retrospective analysis was conducted on MRI T1WI-enhanced images of 105 patients with glioma and 172 patients with solitary brain metastasis from lung cancer, which were confirmed pathologically. The patients were divided into the training group and validation group in an 8:2 ratio for image segmentation, extraction, and filtering; multiple layer perceptron (MLP), support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), and logistic regression (LR) were used for modeling; fivefold cross-validation was used to train the model; the validation group was used to evaluate and assess the predictive performance of the model, ROC curve was used to calculate the accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of the model, and the area under curve (AUC) was used to assess the predictive performance of the model.ResultsThe accuracy and AUC of the MLP differentiation model for high-grade glioma and solitary brain metastasis in the validation group was 0.992, 1.000, respectively, while the sensitivity and specificity were 1.000, 0.968, respectively. The accuracy and AUC for the MLP and SVM differentiation model for high-grade glioma and small cell lung cancer brain metastasis in the validation group was 0.966, 1.000, respectively, while the sensitivity and specificity were 1.000, 0.929, respectively. The accuracy and AUC for the MLP differentiation model for high-grade glioma and non-small cell lung cancer brain metastasis in the validation group was 0.982, 0.999, respectively, while the sensitivity and specificity were 0.958, 1.000, respectively.ConclusionThe application of machine learning-based radiomics has a certain clinical value in differentiating glioma from solitary brain metastasis from lung cancer and its subtypes. In the HGG/SBM and HGG/NSCLC SBM validation groups, the MLP model had the best diagnostic performance, while in the HGG/SCLC SBM validation group, the MLP and SVM models had the best diagnostic performance.