Preoperative evaluation of histologic grade in invasive breast cancer with T2W-MRI based radiomics signature

Abstract

To develop and validate a fat-suppressed (T2 weighted-magnetic resonance imaging, T2W-MRI) based radiomics signature to preoperatively evaluate the histologic grade (grade I/II VS. grade III) of invasive breast cancer. Methods: A total of 202 patients with MRI examination and pathologically confirmed invasive breast cancer from June 2011 to February 2017 were retrospectively enrolled. After retrieving fat-suppressed T2W images and tumor segmentation, radiomics features were extracted and valuable features were selected to build a radiomic signature with the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) method. Mann-Whitney U test was used to explore the correlation between radiomics signature and histologic grade. Receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve was applied to determine the discriminative performance of the radiomics signature [area under curre (AUC), sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy]. An independent validation dataset was used to confirm the discriminatory power of radiomics signature. Results: Eight radiomics features were selected to build a radiomics signature, which showed good performance for preoperatively evaluating histologic grade of invasive breast cancer, with an AUC of 0.802 (95% CI 0.729 to 0.875), sensitivity of 78.7%, specificity of 70.3% and accuracy of 73.7% in training dataset and AUC of 0.812 (95% CI 0.686 to 0.938), sensitivity of 80.0%, specificity of 73.3% and accuracy of 76.0% in the validation dataset. Conclusion: The fat-suppressed T2W-MRI based radiomics signature can be used to preoperatively evaluate the histologic grade of invasive breast cancer, which may assist clinical decision-maker.