AUTHOR=Zhang Bin , Song Lirong , Yin Jiandong 

TITLE=Texture Analysis of DCE-MRI Intratumoral Subregions to Identify Benign and Malignant Breast Tumors

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Oncology

VOLUME=Volume 11 - 2021

YEAR=2021

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/oncology/articles/10.3389/fonc.2021.688182

DOI=10.3389/fonc.2021.688182

ISSN=2234-943X

ABSTRACT=Purpose: To evaluate the potential of the texture features extracted from dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) intratumoral subregions to distinguish benign from malignant breast tumors. 
Materials and Methods: A total of 299 patients who underwent breast DCE-MRI were enrolled. The whole tumor area was semi-automatically segmented on the basis of subtraction images of DCE-MRI in Matlab 2018b. According to the time to peak of the contrast agent, the whole tumor area was partitioned into three subregions: early, moderate, and late. A total of 467 texture features were extracted from the whole tumor area and  three subregions, respectively. Patients were divided into training (n = 209) and validation (n = 90) cohorts by different MRI scanners. The least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) method was used to select optimal feature subset in the training cohort. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was  performed on texture features selected by LASSO to test whether the samples followed a normal distribution. Two machine learning methods, decision tree (DT) and support vector machine (SVM), were used to establish classification models with a 10-fold cross-validation method. The performance of the classification models was evaluated with receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves.
Results: In the training cohort, the areas under the ROC curve (AUCs) for the DT_Whole model and SVM_Whole model were 0.744 and 0.806, respectively. In contrast, the AUCs of the DT_Early model (P = 0.004), DT_Late model (P = 0.015), SVM_Early model (P = 0.002), and SVM_Late model (P = 0.002) were significantly higher: 0.863, 0.860, 0.934, and 0.921, respectively. The SVM_Early model and SVM_Late model achieved better performance than the DT_Early model and DT_Late model (P = 0.003, 0.034, 0.008, and 0.026, respectively). In the validation cohort, the AUCs for the DT_Whole model and SVM_Whole model were 0.670 and 0.708, respectively. In comparison, the AUCs of the DT_Early model (P = 0.006), DT_Late model (P = 0.043), SVM_Early model (P = 0.001), and SVM_Late model (P = 0.007) were significantly higher: 0.839, 0.784, 0.890, and 0.865, respectively. 
Conclusion: The texture features from intratumoral subregions of breast DCE-MRI showed potential in identifying benign and malignant breast tumors.