A radiomics-based model to classify the etiology of liver cirrhosis using gadoxetic acid-enhanced MRI

The implementation of radiomics in radiology is gaining interest due to its wide range of applications. To develop a radiomics-based model for classifying the etiology of liver cirrhosis using gadoxetic acid-enhanced MRI, 248 patients with a known etiology of liver cirrhosis who underwent 306 gadoxetic acid-enhanced MRI examinations were included in the analysis. MRI examinations were classified into 6 groups according to the etiology of liver cirrhosis: alcoholic cirrhosis, viral hepatitis, cholestatic liver disease, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), autoimmune hepatitis, and other. MRI examinations were randomized into training and testing subsets. Radiomics features were extracted from regions of interest segmented in the hepatobiliary phase images. The fivefold cross-validated models (2-dimensional-(2D) and 3-dimensional-(3D) based) differentiating cholestatic cirrhosis from noncholestatic etiologies had the best accuracy (87.5%, 85.6%), sensitivity (97.6%, 95.6%), predictive value (0.883, 0.877), and area under curve (AUC) (0.960, 0.910). The AUC was larger in the 2D-model for viral hepatitis, cholestatic cirrhosis, and NASH-associated cirrhosis (P-value of 0.05, 0.05, 0.87, respectively). In alcoholic cirrhosis, the AUC for the 3D model was larger (P = 0.01). The overall intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) estimates and their 95% confident intervals (CI) for all features combined was 0.68 (CI 0.56-0.87) for 2D and 0.71 (CI 0.61-0.93) for 3D measurements suggesting moderate reliability. Radiomics-based analysis of hepatobiliary phase images of gadoxetic acid-enhanced MRI may be a promising noninvasive method for identifying the etiology of liver cirrhosis with better performance of the 2D- compared with the 3D-generated models.