Optimizing the Peritumoral Region Size in Radiomics Analysis for Sentinel Lymph Node Status Prediction in Breast Cancer

Rationale and Objectives: Peritumoral features have been suggested to be useful in improving the prediction performance of radiomic models. The aim of this study is to systematically investigate the prediction performance improvement for sentinel lymph node (SLN) status in breast cancer from peritumoral features in radiomic analysis by exploring the effect of peritumoral region sizes. Materials and Methods: This retrospective study was performed using dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI scans of 162 breast cancer patients. The effect of peritumoral features was evaluated in a radiomics pipeline for predicting SLN metastasis in breast cancer. Peritumoral regions were generated by dilating the tumor regions-of-interest (ROls) manually annotated by two expert radiologists, with thicknesses of 2 mm, 4 mm, 6 mm, and 8 mm. The prediction models were established in the training set (similar to 67% of cases) using the radiomics pipeline with and without peritumoral features derived from different peritumoral thicknesses. The prediction performance was tested in an independent validation set (the remaining similar to 33%). Results: For this specific application, the accuracy in the validation set when using the two radiologists' ROIs could be both improved from 0.704 to 0.796 by incorporating peritumoral features. The choice of the peritumoral size could affect the level of improvement. Conclusion: This study systematically investigates the effect of peritumoral region sizes in radiomic analysis for prediction performance improvement. The choice of the peritumoral size is dependent on the ROI drawing and would affect the final prediction performance of radiomic models, suggesting that peritumoral features should be optimized in future radiomics studies.