Predicting axillary response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy using peritumoral and intratumoral ultrasound radiomics in breast cancer subtypes
Jiejie Yao, Xiaohong Jia, Wei Zhou, Ying Zhu, Xiaosong Chen, Weiwei Zhan, Jianqiao Zhou
Abstract
To explore machine learning (ML)-based breast tumor peritumoral (P) and intratumoral ultrasound radiomics signatures (IURS) for predicting axillary response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) in patients with breast cancer (BC) with node-positive. A total of 435 patients were divided into hormone receptor (HR)+/human epidermal growth factor receptor (HER)2-, HER2+, and triple-negative (TN) subtypes. ML classifiers including random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) were applied to construct PURS, IURS, and the combined P-IURS radiomics models. SVM of the TN subtype obtained the most favorable performance with an AUC of 0.917 (95%CI: 0.859, 0.960) in PURS models, RF of the HER2+ subtype yielded the highest efficacy in IURS models [AUC = 0.935 (95%CI: 0.843, 0.976)]. The RF-based combined P-IURS model of the HER2+ subtype improved the efficacy to a maximum AUC of 0.952 (95%CI: 0.868, 0.994). ML-based US radiomics can be a promising biomarker to predict axillary response.