NIMG-55. A COMPARISON OF THREE DIFFERENT DEEP LEARNING-BASED MODELS TO PREDICT THE MGMT PROMOTER METHYLATION STATUS IN GLIOBLASTOMA USING BRAIN MRI

Abstract

Abstract GBM is the most common primary malignant brain tumor in adults. O6-methylguanine DNA methyltransferase (MGMT) promoter methylation status is an important prognostic biomarker that predicts the response to temozolomide and guides the treatment decisions. At present, the only reliable way to determine MGMT promoter methylation status is through the analysis of tumor tissues. Given the limitations and complications of histology-based methods, an imaging-based approach for non-invasively MGMT promoter methylation status prediction is beneficial. This study aimed to develop and compare three different deep-learning-based approaches for predicting MGMT promoter methylation status non-invasively. We obtained 576 T2 weighted images (T2WIs) with their corresponding tumor masks and MGMT promoter methylation status from, The Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) 2021 datasets. Dataset was split into five folds at the patient's level stratified by MGMT promoter methylation status to perform a 5-fold cross-validation. We developed three different models: voxel-wise, slice-wise, and whole-brain. For voxel-wise classification, methylated and unmethylated MGMT tumor masks were made into 1 and 2 with 0 background, respectively. We converted each T2WI into 32x32x32 patches. We trained a 3D-Vnet model for tumor segmentation. After inference, we constructed the whole brain volume based on the patch's coordinates. The final prediction of MGMT methylation status was made by majority voting between the predicted voxel values of the biggest connected component. For slice-wise classification, we trained an object detection model for tumor detection and MGMT methylation status prediction; then, we used majority voting for the final prediction. For the whole-brain approach, we trained a 3D Densenet121 for prediction. Whole-brain, slice-wise, voxel-wise, accuracy was 65.42%(SD 3.97%), 61.37%(SD 1.48%), and 56.84%(SD 4.38%) respectively. We found that across the whole-brain, slice-wise, and voxel-wise deep learning approaches, the whole-brain approach is the most effective approach for MGMT methylation status prediction on the BraTS 2021 dataset.