Invasive ductal breast cancer: preoperative predict Ki-67 index based on radiomics of ADC maps

Purpose The purpose of this study is to develop a radiomics model for predicting the Ki-67 proliferation index in patients with invasive ductal breast cancer through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) preoperatively. Materials and methods A total of 128 patients who were clinicopathologically diagnosed with invasive ductal breast cancer were recruited. This cohort included 32 negative Ki67 expression (Ki67 proliferation index < 14%) and 96 cases with positive Ki67 expression (Ki67 proliferation index ≥ 14%). All patients had undergone diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) MRI before surgery on a 3.0T MRI scanner. Radiomics features were extracted from apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) maps which were obtained by DWI-MRI from patients with invasive ductal breast cancer. 80% of the patients were divided into training set to build radiomics model, and the rest into test set to evaluate its performance. The least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) was used to select radiomics features, and then, the logistic regression (LR) model was established using fivefold cross-validation to predict the Ki-67 index. The performance was evaluated by receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) analysis, accuracy, sensitivity and specificity. Results Quantitative imaging features ( n = 1029) were extracted from ADC maps, and 11 features were selected to construct the LR model. Good identification ability was exhibited by the ADC-based radiomics model, with areas under the ROC (AUC) values of 0.75 ± 0.08, accuracy of 0.71 in training set and 0.72, 0.70 in test set. Conclusions The ADC-based radiomics model is a feasible predictor for the Ki-67 index in patients with invasive ductal breast cancer. Therefore, we proposed that three-dimensional imaging features from ADC maps could be used as candidate biomarker for preoperative prediction the Ki-67 index noninvasively.