Affiliations: [a]
Department of Radiology, Tongde Hospital of Zhejiang Province, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China
| [b]
Department of Radiology, Affiliated Hospital of Jiangnan University, The Fourth People’s Hospital of Wuxi City, Wuxi, Jiangsu, China
Correspondence:
[*]
Corresponding author: You-Gen Cheng, Department of Radiology, Tongde Hospital of Zhejiang Province, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, 310012, China. Tel.: +86 15312238218; E-mail: qiong953780@163.com.
Note: [1] These authors contributed equally to this work.
Abstract: PURPOSE:To explore the radiomics features of triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) and non-triple negative breast cancer (non-TNBC) based on X-ray mammography, and to differentiate the two groups of cases. MATERIALS AND METHODS:Preoperative mammograms of 120 patients with breast ductal carcinoma confirmed by surgical pathology were retrospectively analyzed, which include 30 TNBC and 90 non-TNBC patients. The manual segmentation of breast lesions was performed by ITK-SNAP software and 12 radiomics features were extracted by Omni-Kinetics software. The differences of these radiomics features between TNBC and non-TNBC groups were compared, and the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was used to determine the optimal cutoff value of each radiomics parameter for differentiating TNBC from non-TNBC, and the corresponding area under the curve (AUC), sensitivity and specificity were obtained. RESULTS:There were statistically significant differences for 4 radiomics features between TNBC and non-TNBC datasets (P < 0.05). They were the roundness, concavity, gray average and skewness of breast lesions. Compared with non-TNBC, TNBC cases have following characteristics of (1) more round with the roundness of 0.621 vs. 0.413 (P < 0.001), (2) more regular with the concavity of 0.087 vs. 0.141 (P < 0.01), (3) higher density or gray average (67.261 vs. 56.842, P < 0.05), and (4) lower skewness (– 0.837 vs.– 0.671, P = 0.034). AUCs of ROC curves computed using features of the roundness and concavity were both larger than 0.70. CONCLUSION:Radiomics features based on X-ray mammography may be helpful to distinguish between TNBC and non-TNBC, which were associated with breast tumor histology.
Keywords: Triple negative breast cancer, X-ray mammography, quantitative imaging markers, evaluation of tumor characteristics
