Radiomics prediction of MGMT promoter methylation in adult diffuse gliomas: a combination of structural MRI, DCE, and DTI.

Abstract

Purpose: To assess the predictive value of radiomics features extracted from structural MRI, dynamic contrast enhanced (DCE), and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) in detecting O6-methylguanine-DNA methyltransferase (MGMT) promoter methylation in patients with diffuse gliomas.

Methods: Retrospective MRI data of 110 patients were enrolled in this study. The training dataset included 88 patients (mean age 52.84 ± 14.71, 47 females). The test dataset included 22 patients (mean age 50.64 ± 12.58, 12 females). A total of 2,782 radiomic features were extracted from structural MRI, DCE, and DTI within two region of interests (ROIs). Feature section was conducted using Pearson correlation and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator. Principal component analysis was utilized for dimensionality reduction. Support vector machine was employed for model construction. Two radiologists with 1 year and 5 years of experience evaluated the MGMT status in the test dataset as a comparison with the models. The chi-square test and independent samples t-test were used for assessing the statistical differences in patients' clinical characteristics.

Results: On the training dataset, the model structural MRI + DCE achieved the highest AUC of 0.906. On the test dataset, the model structural MRI + DCE + DTI achieved the highest AUC of 0.868, outperforming two radiologists.

Conclusion: The radiomics models have obtained promising performance in predicting MGMT promoter methylation status. Adding DCE and DTI features can provide extra information to structural MRI in detecting MGMT promoter methylation.