Prediction of angiogenesis in extrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma using MRI-based machine learning

Reliable noninvasive method to preoperative prediction of extrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (eCCA) angiogenesis are needed. This study aims to develop and validate machine learning models based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for predicting vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) expression and the microvessel density (MVD) of eCCA.

In this retrospective study from August 2011 to May 2020, eCCA patients with pathological confirmation were selected. Features were extracted from T1-weighted, T2-weighted, and diffusion-weighted images using the MaZda software. After reliability testing and feature screening, retained features were used to establish classification models for predicting VEGF expression and regression models for predicting MVD. The performance of both models was evaluated respectively using area under the curve (AUC) and Adjusted R-Squared (Adjusted R2).

The machine learning models were developed in 100 patients. A total of 900 features were extracted and 77 features with intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) < 0.75 were eliminated. Among all the combinations of data preprocessing methods and classification algorithms, Z-score standardization + logistic regression exhibited excellent ability both in the training cohort (average AUC = 0.912) and the testing cohort (average AUC = 0.884). For regression model, Z-score standardization + stochastic gradient descent-based linear regression performed well in the training cohort (average Adjusted R2 = 0.975), and was also better than the mean model in the test cohort (average Adjusted R2 = 0.781).

Two machine learning models based on MRI can accurately predict VEGF expression and the MVD of eCCA respectively.