Machine-learning radiomics to predict bone marrow metastasis of neuroblastoma using magnetic resonance imaging

Neuroblastoma is one common pediatric malignancy notorious for high temporal and spatial heterogeneities. More than half of its patients develop distant metastases involving vascularized organs, especially the bone marrow. It is thus necessary to have an economical, noninvasive method without much radiation for follow-ups. Radiomics has been used in many cancers to assist accurate diagnosis but not yet in bone marrow metastasis in neuroblastoma.

A total of 182 patients with neuroblastoma were retrospectively collected and randomly divided into the training and validation sets. Five-hundred and seventy-two radiomics features were extracted from magnetic resonance imaging, among which 41 significant ones were selected via T-test for model development. We attempted 13 machine-learning algorithms and eventually chose three best-performed models. The integrative performance evaluations are based on the area under the curves (AUCs), calibration curves, risk deciles plots, and other indexes.

Extreme gradient boosting, random forest (RF), and adaptive boosting were the top three to predict bone marrow metastases in neuroblastoma while RF was the most accurate one. Its AUC was 0.90 (0.86-0.93), F1 score was 0.82, sensitivity was 0.76, and negative predictive value was 0.79 in the training set. The values were 0.82 (0.71-0.93), 0.80, 0.75, and 0.92 in the validation set, respectively.

Radiomics models are likely to contribute more to metastatic diagnoses and the formulation of personalized healthcare strategies in clinics. It has great potential of being a revolutionary method to replace traditional interventions in the future.