Differentiating Between Multiple Myeloma and Metastasis Subtypes of Lumbar Vertebra Lesions Using Machine Learning-Based Radiomics

Objective To determine whether machine learning based on conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) sequences have the potential for the differential diagnosis of multiple myeloma (MM), and different tumor metastasis lesions of the lumbar vertebra. Methods We retrospectively enrolled 107 patients newly diagnosed with MM and different metastasis of the lumbar vertebra. In total 60 MM lesions and 118 metastasis lesions were selected for training classifiers (70%) and subsequent validation (30%). Following segmentation, 282 texture features were extracted from both T1WI and T2WI images. Following regression analysis using the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) algorithm, the following machine learning models were selected: Support-Vector Machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Random Forest (RF), Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), and Naive Bayes (NB) using 10-fold cross validation, and the performances were evaluated using a confusion matrix. Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC), sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of the models were also calculated. Results To differentiate MM and metastasis, 13 features in the T1WI images and 9 features in the T2WI images were obtained. Among the 10 classifiers, the ANN classifier from the T2WI images achieved the best performance (MCC = 0.605) with accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of 0.815, 0.879, and 0.790, respectively, in the validation cohort. To differentiate MM and metastasis subtypes, eight features in the T1WI images and seven features in the T2WI images were obtained. Among the 10 classifiers, the ANN classifier from the T2WI images achieved the best performance (MCC = 0.560, 0.412, 0.449), respectively, with accuracy = 0.648; sensitivity 0.714, 0.821, 0.897 and specificity 0.775, 0.600, 0.640 for the MM, lung, and other metastases, respectively, in the validation cohort. Conclusions Machine learning-based classifiers showed a satisfactory performance in differentiating MM lesions from those of tumor metastasis. While their value for distinguishing myeloma from different metastasis subtypes was moderate.