Developing a Radiomics Signature for Supratentorial Extra-Ventricular Ependymoma Using Multimodal MR Imaging

Apoorva Safai; Sumeet Shinde; Manali Jadhav; Tanay Chougule; Abhilasha Indoria; Manoj Kumar; Vani Santosh; Shumyla Jabeen; Manish Beniwal; Subhash Konar; Jitender Saini; Madhura Ingalhalikar

doi:10.3389/fneur.2021.648092

Developing a Radiomics Signature for Supratentorial Extra-Ventricular Ependymoma Using Multimodal MR Imaging

Front Neurol. 2021 Jul 22:12:648092. doi: 10.3389/fneur.2021.648092. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Symbiosis Center for Medical Image Analysis, Symbiosis Institute of Technology, Symbiosis International University, Pune, India.
² Department of Neuroimaging & Interventional Radiology, National Institute of Mental Health & Neurosciences, Bangalore, India.
³ Department of Neuropathology, National Institute of Mental Health & Neurosciences, Bangalore, India.
⁴ Department of Neurosurgery, National Institute of Mental Health & Neurosciences, Bangalore, India.

Abstract

Rationale and Objectives: To build a machine learning-based diagnostic model that can accurately distinguish adult supratentorial extraventricular ependymoma (STEE) from similarly appearing high-grade gliomas (HGG) using quantitative radiomic signatures from a multi-parametric MRI framework. Materials and Methods: We computed radiomic features on the preprocessed and segmented tumor masks from a pre-operative multimodal MRI dataset [contrast-enhanced T1 (T1ce), T2, fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR), apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC)] from STEE (n = 15), HGG-Grade IV (HGG-G4) (n = 24), and HGG-Grade III (HGG-G3) (n = 36) patients, followed by an optimum two-stage feature selection and multiclass classification. Performance of multiple classifiers were evaluated on both unimodal and multimodal feature sets and most discriminative radiomic features involved in classification of STEE from HGG subtypes were obtained. Results: Multimodal features demonstrated higher classification performance over unimodal feature set in discriminating STEE and HGG subtypes with an accuracy of 68% on test data and above 80% on cross validation, along with an overall above 90% specificity. Among unimodal feature sets, those extracted from FLAIR demonstrated high classification performance in delineating all three tumor groups. Texture-based radiomic features particularly from FLAIR were most important in discriminating STEE from HGG-G4, whereas first-order features from T2 and ADC consistently ranked higher in differentiating multiple tumor groups. Conclusions: This study illustrates the utility of radiomics-based multimodal MRI framework in accurately discriminating similarly appearing adult STEE from HGG subtypes. Radiomic features from multiple MRI modalities could capture intricate and complementary information for a robust and highly accurate multiclass tumor classification.

Keywords: GBM; MRI; classification; ependymoma; glioblastoma multiforme; high grade glioblastoma; radiomics.