MR-radiomic biopsy for estimation of malignancy grade in parotid gland cancer

We have developed a magnetic resonance (MR) image-based radiomic biopsy approach for estimation of malignancy grade in parotid gland cancer (PGC). Preoperative T1- and T2-weighted MR images of 39 PGC patients with 20 highand 19 intermediate-/low-malignancy grades were employed. High- versus intermediate-/low-malignancy grades were estimated using MR-radiomic biopsy approaches, i.e. 972 hand-crafted feature and transfer learning of five pre-trained deep learning (DL) architectures (AlexNet, GoogLeNet, VGG-16, ResNet-101, DenseNet-201). The 39 patients were divided into 70% for training datasets and 30% for test datasets. The hand-crafted features were extracted from cancer regions in T1- and T2-weighted MR images. Three features were selected as a radiomic signature by using a least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), whose coefficients of three features were used for constructing the radiomic score (Rad-score). The two grade malignancy was estimated by using an optimal cut-off value of Rad-score. On the other hand, last three layers of the DL architectures were replaced with new three layers for the estimation task. The DL architectures were fine-tuned with training datasets and were evaluated with test datasets. The performances of the MR-radiomic biopsy approaches were assessed by using the accuracy and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). The VGG-16 demonstrated the best performance (accuracy=85.4%, AUC=0.906), but the other approaches showed worse performances (Rad-score: 83.3%, 0.830, AlexNet: 84.4%, 0.915, GoogLeNet: 84.9%, 0.884, ResNet-101: 84.9%, 0.918, DenseNet-201: 84.4%, 0.869) than the VGG-16. The VGG-16-based MR-radiomic biopsy could be feasible for the malignancy grade estimation of PGC.