Breast Cancer Molecular Subtype Prediction by Mammographic Radiomic Features

This study aimed to investigate whether quantitative radiomic features extracted from digital mammogram images are associated with molecular subtypes of breast cancer.

In this institutional review board-approved retrospective study, we collected 331 Chinese women who were diagnosed with invasive breast cancer in 2015. This cohort included 29 triple-negative, 45 human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)-enriched, 36 luminal A, and 221 luminal B lesions. A set of 39 quantitative radiomic features, including morphologic, grayscale statistic, and texture features, were extracted from the segmented lesion area. Three binary classifications of the subtypes were performed: triple-negative vs non-triple-negative, HER2-enriched vs non-HER2-enriched, and luminal (A + B) vs nonluminal. The Naive Bayes machine learning scheme was employed for the classification, and the least absolute shrink age and selection operator method was used to select the most predictive features for the classifiers. Classification performance was evaluated by the area under receiver operating characteristic curve and accuracy.

The model that used the combination of both the craniocaudal and the mediolateral oblique view images achieved the overall best performance than using either of the two views alone, yielding an area under receiver operating characteristic curve (or accuracy) of 0.865 (0.796) for triple-negative vs non-triple-negative, 0.784 (0.748) for HER2-enriched vs non-HER2-enriched, and 0.752 (0.788) for luminal vs nonluminal subtypes. Twelve most predictive features were selected by the least absolute shrink age and selection operator method and four of them (ie, roundness, concavity, gray mean, and correlation) showed a statistical significance (P< .05) in the subtype classification.

Our study showed that quantitative radiomic imaging features of breast tumor extracted from digital mammograms are associated with breast cancer subtypes. Future larger studies are needed to further evaluate the findings.