Non-Invasive Assessment of Breast Cancer Molecular Subtypes with Multiparametric Magnetic Resonance Imaging Radiomics

Abstract

We evaluated the performance of radiomics and artificial intelligence (AI) from multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for the assessment of breast cancer molecular subtypes. Ninety-one breast cancer patients who underwent 3T dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) MRI and diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) with apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) mapping were included retrospectively. Radiomic features were extracted from manually drawn regions of interest (n = 704 features per lesion) on initial DCE-MRI and ADC maps. The ten best features for subtype separation were selected using probability of error and average correlation coefficients. For pairwise comparisons with >20 patients in each group, a multi-layer perceptron feed-forward artificial neural network (MLP-ANN) was used (70% of cases for training, 30%, for validation, five times each). For all other separations, linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and leave-one-out cross-validation were applied. Histopathology served as the reference standard. MLP-ANN yielded an overall median area under the receiver-operating-characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.86 (0.77–0.92) for the separation of triple negative (TN) from other cancers. The separation of luminal A and TN cancers yielded an overall median AUC of 0.8 (0.75–0.83). Radiomics and AI from multiparametric MRI may aid in the non-invasive differentiation of TN and luminal A breast cancers from other subtypes.