Effects of MRI scanner parameters on breast cancer radiomics

To assess the impact of varying magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner parameters on the extraction of algorithmic features in breast MRI radiomics studies.

In this retrospective study, breast imaging data for 272 patients were analyzed with magnetic resonance (MR) images. From the MR images, we assembled and implemented 529 algorithmic features of breast tumors and fibrograndular tissue (FGT). We divided the features into 10 groups based on the type of data used for the feature extraction and the nature of the extracted information. Three scanner parameters were considered: scanner manufacturer, scanner magnetic field strength, and slice thickness. We assessed the impact of each of the scanner parameters on each of the feature by testing whether the feature values are systematically diverse for different values of these scanner parameters. A two-sample t-test has been used to establish whether the impact of a scanner parameter on values of a feature is significant and receiver operating characteristics have been used for to establish the extent of that effect.

On average, higher proportion (69% FGT versus 20% tumor) of FGT related features were affected by the three scanner parameters. Of all feature groups and scanner parameters, the feature group related to the variation in FGT enhancement was found to be the most sensitive to the scanner manufacturer (AUC = 0.81 ± 0.14).

Features involving calculations from FGT are particularly sensitive to the scanner parameters.