Machine learning for predicting breast-conserving surgery candidates after neoadjuvant chemotherapy based on DCE-MRI

Purpose: This study aimed to investigate a machine learning method for predicting breast-conserving surgery (BCS) candidates, from patients who received neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) by using dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) obtained before and after NAC.Materials and methods: This retrospective study included 75 patients who underwent NAC and breast surgery. First, 3,390 features were comprehensively extracted from pre- and post-NAC DCE-MRIs. Then patients were then divided into two groups: type 1, patients with pathologic complete response (pCR) and single lesion shrinkage; type 2, major residual lesion with satellite foci, multifocal residual, stable disease (SD), and progressive disease (PD). The logistic regression (LR) was used to build prediction models to identify the two groups. Prediction performance was assessed using the area under the curve (AUC), accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity.Results: Radiomics features were significantly related to breast cancer shrinkage after NAC. The combination model achieved an AUC of 0.82, and the pre-NAC model was 0.64, the post-NAC model was 0.70, and the pre-post-NAC model was 0.80. In the combination model, 15 features, including nine wavelet-based features, four Laplacian-of-Gauss (LoG) features, and two original features, were filtered. Among these selected were four features from pre-NAC DCE-MRI, six were from post-NAC DCE-MRI, and five were from pre-post-NAC features.Conclusion: The model combined with pre- and post-NAC DCE-MRI can effectively predict candidates to undergo BCS and provide AI-based decision support for clinicians with ensured safety. High-order (LoG- and wavelet-based) features play an important role in our machine learning model. The features from pre-post-NAC DCE-MRI had better predictive performance.