Accurate prediction of glioma grades from radiomics using a multi-filter and multi-objective-based method

Radiomics, providing quantitative data extracted from medical images, has emerged as a critical role in diagnosis and classification of diseases such as glioma. One main challenge is how to uncover key disease-relevant features from the large amount of extracted quantitative features. Many existing methods suffer from low accuracy or overfitting. We propose a new method, Multiple-Filter and Multi-Objective-based method (MFMO), to identify predictive and robust biomarkers for disease diagnosis and classification. This method combines a multi-filter feature extraction with a multi-objective optimization-based feature selection model, which identifies a small set of predictive radiomic biomarkers with less redundancy. Taking magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images-based glioma grading as a case study, we identify 10 key radiomic biomarkers that can accurately distinguish low-grade glioma (LGG) from high-grade glioma (HGG) on both training and test datasets. Using these 10 signature features, the classification model reaches training Area Under the receiving operating characteristic Curve (AUC) of 0.96 and test AUC of 0.95, which shows superior performance over existing methods and previously identified biomarkers.