Machine learning-based radiomics using MRI to differentiate early-stage Duchenne and Becker muscular dystrophy in...

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) and Becker muscular dystrophy (BMD) present similar symptoms in the early stage, complicating their differentiation. This study aims to develop a classification model using radiomic features from MRI T2-weighted Dixon sequences to increase the accuracy of distinguishing DMD and BMD in the early disease stage.

We retrospectively analysed MRI data from 62 patients aged 36-60 months with muscular dystrophy, including 41 with DMD and 21 with BMD. Radiomic features were extracted from in-phase, opposed-phase, water, fat, and postprocessed fat fraction images. We employed a deep learning segmentation method to segment regions of interest automatically. Feature selection included the Mann‒Whitney U test for identifying significant features, Pearson correlation analysis to remove collinear features, and the LASSO regression method to select features with nonzero coefficients. These selected features were then used in various machine learning algorithms to construct the classification model, and their diagnostic performance was compared.

Our proposed radiomic and machine learning methods effectively distinguished early DMD and BMD. The machine learning models significantly outperformed the radiologists in terms of accuracy (81.2-90.6% compared with 69.4%), specificity (71.0-86.0% compared with 19.0%), and F1 score (85.2-92.6% compared with 80.5%), while maintaining relatively high sensitivity (85.6-95.0% compared with 95.1%).

Radiomics based on Dixon sequences combined with machine learning methods can effectively distinguish between DMD and BMD in the early stages, providing a new and effective tool for the early diagnosis of these muscular dystrophies.

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