Prediction of 1p/19q state in glioma by integrated deep learning method based on MRI radiomics

To predict the 1p/19q molecular status of Lower-grade glioma (LGG) patients nondestructively, this study developed a deep learning (DL) approach using radiomic to provide a potential decision aid for clinical determination of molecular stratification of LGG.

The study retrospectively collected images and clinical data of 218 patients diagnosed with LGG between July 2018 and July 2022, including 155 cases from The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) database and 63 cases from a regional medical centre. Patients' clinical data and MRI images were collected, including contrast-enhanced T1-weighted images and T2-weighted images. After pre-processing the image data, tumour regions of interest (ROI) were segmented by two senior neurosurgeons. In this study, an Ensemble Convolutional Neural Network (ECNN) was proposed to predict the 1p/19q status. This method, consisting of Variational Autoencoder (VAE), Information Gain (IG) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), is compared with four machine learning algorithms (Random Forest, Decision Tree, K-Nearest Neighbour, Gaussian Neff Bayes). Fivefold cross-validation was used to evaluate and calibrate the model. Precision, recall, accuracy, F1 score and area under the curve (AUC) were calculated to assess model performance.

Our cohort comprises 118 patients diagnosed with 1p/19q codeletion and 100 patients diagnosed with 1p/19q non-codeletion. The study findings indicate that the ECNN method demonstrates excellent predictive performance on the validation dataset. Our model achieved an average precision of 0.981, average recall of 0.980, average F1-score of 0.981, and average accuracy of 0.981. The average area under the curve (AUC) for our model is 0.994, surpassing that of the other four traditional machine learning algorithms (AUC: 0.523-0.702). This suggests that the model based on the ECNN algorithm performs well in distinguishing the 1p/19q molecular status of LGG patients.

The deep learning model based on conventional MRI radiomic integrates VAE and IG methods. Compared with traditional machine learning algorithms, it shows the best performance in the prediction of 1p/19q molecular co-deletion status. It may become a potentially effective tool for non-invasively and effectively identifying molecular features of lower-grade glioma in the future, providing an important reference for clinicians to formulate individualized diagnosis and treatment plans.