Predicted disease compositions of human gliomas estimated from multiparametric MRI can predict endothelial proliferation, tumor grade, and overall survival

Background and Purpose: Biopsy is the main determinants of glioma clinical management, but require invasive sampling that fail to detect relevant features because of tumor heterogeneity. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the accuracy of a voxel-wise, multiparametric MRI radiomic method to predict features and develop a minimally invasive method to objectively assess neoplasms. Methods: Multiparametric MRI were registered to T1-weighted gadolinium contrast-enhanced data using a 12 degree-of-freedom affine model. The retrospectively collected MRI data included T1-weighted, T1-weighted gadolinium contrast-enhanced, T2-weighted, fluid attenuated inversion recovery, and multi-b-value diffusion-weighted acquired at 1.5T or 3.0T. Clinical experts provided voxel-wise annotations for five disease states on a subset of patients to establish a training feature vector of 611,930 observations. Then, a k-nearest-neighbor (k-NN) classifier was trained using a 25% hold-out design. The trained k-NN model was applied to 13,018,171 observations from seventeen histologically confirmed glioma patients. Linear regression tested overall survival (OS) relationship to predicted disease compositions (PDC) and diagnostic age (alpha = 0.05). Canonical discriminant analysis tested if PDC and diagnostic age could differentiate clinical, genetic, and microscopic factors (alpha = 0.05). Results: The model predicted voxel annotation class with a Dice similarity coefficient of 94.34% +/- 2.98. Linear combinations of PDCs and diagnostic age predicted OS (p = 0.008), grade (p = 0.014), and endothelia proliferation (p = 0.003); but fell short predicting gene mutations for TP53BP1 and IDH1. Conclusions: This voxel-wise, multi-parametric MRI radiomic strategy holds potential as a non-invasive decision-making aid for clinicians managing patients with glioma.