Multicontrast MRI-based radiomics for the prediction of pathological complete response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy in patients with early triple negative breast cancer

Introduction To assess pre-therapeutic MRI-based radiomic analysis to predict the pathological complete response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) in women with early triple negative breast cancer (TN). Materials and methods This monocentric retrospective study included 75 TN female patients with MRI (T1-weighted, T2-weighted, diffusion-weighted and dynamic contrast enhancement images) performed before NAC. For each patient, the tumor(s) and the parenchyma were independently segmented and analyzed with radiomic analysis to extract shape, size, and texture features. Several sets of features were realized based on the 4 different sequence images. Performances of 4 classifiers (random forest, multilayer perceptron, support vector machine (SVM) with linear or quadratic kernel) were compared based on pathological complete response (defined on the excised tissues), on 100 draws with 75% as training set and 25% as test. Results The combination of features extracted from different MR images improved the classifier performance (more precisely, the features from T1W, T2W and DWI). The SVM with quadratic kernel showed the best performance with a mean AUC of 0.83, a sensitivity of 0.85 and a specificity of 0.75 in the test set. Conclusion MRI-based radiomics may be relevant to predict NAC response in TN cancer. Our results promote the use of multi-contrast MRI sources for radiomics, providing enrich source of information to enhance model generalization.