PET/CT-based radiomics analysis may help to predict neoadjuvant chemotherapy outcomes in breast cancer

The aim of this study was to evaluate the clinical usefulness of radiomics signature-derived ¹⁸F-fluorodeoxyglucose (¹⁸F-FDG) positron emission tomography-computed tomography (PET-CT) for the early prediction of neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) outcomes in patients with (BC).

A total of 124 patients with BC who underwent pretreatment PET-CT scanning and received NAC between December 2016 and August 2019 were studied. The dataset was randomly assigned in a 7:3 ratio to either the training or validation cohort. Primary tumor segmentation was performed, and radiomics signatures were extracted from each PET-derived volume of interest (VOI) and CT-derived VOI. Radiomics signatures associated with pathological treatment response were selected from within a training cohort (n = 85), which were then applied to generate different classifiers to predict the probability of pathological complete response (pCR). Different models were then independently tested in the validation cohort (n = 39) regarding their accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and area under the curve (AUC).

Thirty-five patients (28.2%) had pCR to NAC. Twelve features consisting of five PET-derived signatures, four CT-derived signatures, and three clinicopathological variables were candidates for the model's development. The random forest (RF), k-nearest neighbors (KNN), and decision tree (DT) classifiers were established, which could be utilized to predict pCR to NAC with AUC ranging from 0.819 to 0.849 in the validation cohort.

The PET/CT-based radiomics analysis might provide efficient predictors of pCR in patients with BC, which could potentially be applied in clinical practice for individualized treatment strategy formulation.