MRI Radiomics and Machine Learning for the Prediction of Oncotype Dx Recurrence Score in Invasive Breast Cancer

Simple Summary The preoperative definition of the Oncotype DX recurrence score would be critical to identify breast cancer patients who could benefit from chemotherapy before surgery. In this work, we built a machine learning model applied to DCE-MRI images of a publicly available dataset to predict the Oncotype DX score in patients with breast cancer. As a result, the model achieved an accuracy of 60% in the training set and 63% (AUC = 0.66) in the test set. Our findings support the feasibility of radiomics and machine learning for the prediction of prognostic data in breast cancer, encouraging further, preferably multicenter, investigations to further improve the performance of the model and assess its generalizability. Aim: To non-invasively predict Oncotype DX recurrence scores (ODXRS) in patients with ER+ HER2- invasive breast cancer (IBC) using dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) MRI-derived radiomics features extracted from primary tumor lesions and a ML algorithm. Materials and Methods: Pre-operative DCE-MRI of patients with IBC, no history of neoadjuvant therapy prior to MRI, and for which the ODXRS was available, were retrospectively selected from a public dataset. ODXRS was obtained on histological tumor samples and considered as positive if greater than 16 and 26 in patients aged under and over 50 years, respectively. Tumor lesions were manually annotated by three independent operators on DCE-MRI images through 3D ROIs positioning. Radiomic features were therefore extracted and selected using multistep feature selection process. A logistic regression ML classifier was then employed for the prediction of ODXRS. Results: 248 patients were included, of which 87 with positive ODXRS. 166 (66%) patients were grouped in the training set, while 82 (33%) in the test set. A total of 1288 features was extracted. Of these, 1244 were excluded as 771, 82 and 391 were excluded as not stable (n = 771), not variant (n = 82), and highly intercorrelated (n = 391), respectively. After the use of recursive feature elimination with logistic regression estimator and polynomial transformation, 92 features were finally selected. In the training set, the logistic regression classifier obtained an overall mean accuracy of 60%. In the test set, the accuracy of the ML classifier was 63%, with a sensitivity of 80%, specificity of 43%, and AUC of 66%. Conclusions: Radiomics and ML applied to pre-operative DCE-MRI in patients with IBC showed promises for the non-invasive prediction of ODXRS, aiding in selecting patients who will benefit from NAC.

Automated summary

In this study, a machine learning model was developed to predict the Oncotype DX score using DCE-MRI images of breast cancer patients. The model achieved an accuracy of 60% in the training set and 63% (AUC = 0.66) in the test set. These findings support the use of radiomics and machine learning for prognostic data prediction in breast cancer, with potential clinical applications.