MRI Radiomics-Based Machine Learning to Predict Lymphovascular Invasion of HER2-Positive Breast Cancer

Abstract

This study aims to develop and prospectively validate radiomic models based on MRI to predict lymphovascular invasion (LVI) status in patients with HER2-positive breast cancer. A total of 225 patients with HER2-positive breast cancer who preoperatively underwent breast MRI were selected, forming the training set (n = 99 LVI-positive, n = 126 LVI-negative). A prospective validation cohort included 130 patients with breast cancer from the Affiliated Zhongshan Hospital of Dalian University (n = 57 LVI-positive, n = 73 LVI-negative). A total of 390 radiomic features and eight conventional radiological characteristics were extracted. For the optimum feature selection phase, the LASSO regression model with tenfold cross-validation (CV) was employed to identify features with non-zero coefficients. The conventional radiological (CR) model was determined based on visual morphological (VM) features and the optimal radiomic features correlated with LVI, identified through multivariate logistic analyses. Subsequently, various machine learning (ML) models were developed using algorithms such as support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbor (KNN), gradient boosting machine (GBM), and random forest (RF). The performance of ML and CR models. The results show that the AUC of the CR model in the training and validation sets were 0.81 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.74-0.86) and 0.82 (95% CI, 0.69-0.89), respectively. The ML model achieved the best performance, with AUCs of 0.96 (95% CI, 0.99-1.00) in the training set and 0.95 (95% CI, 0.89-0.96) in the validation set. There were significant differences between the CR and ML models in predicting LVI status. Our study demonstrated that the machine learning models exhibited superior performance in predicting LVI status based on pretreatment MRI compared to the CR model, which does not necessarily rely on a priori knowledge of visual morphology.

Keywords: Breast cancer; HER2-positive; MRI; Machine learning; Radiomic.

Fig. 1

Flow diagram showing the numbers of patients who met the inclusion and exclusion criteria for training and external validation sets

Fig. 2

The detailed schematic of the predictive model developed to predict LVI status

Fig. 3

Case presentation. Two breast cancer patients with Her-2 positives, showing a strongly enhanced homogeneous lesion. The probability predicted by CR combined VM and radiomics features were 0.72 and 0.67, respectively; while the probability predicted by ML model were consistent with pathological results with AUC were 0.92 and 0.91