Handcrafted radiomics, deep radiomics and transcriptomics data provide complementary and potentiating prognostic information in soft-tissue sarcoma patients
Amandine Crombé, Talence / France
Author Block: A. Crombé, C. Lucchesi, F. Bertolo, M. Kind, A. Michot, R. Perret, F. Le Loarer, A. Bourdon, A. Italiano; Bordeaux/FRPurpose: The purpose of this study was to identify subgroups of soft-tissue sarcoma (STS) patients using handcrafted and deep radiomics, to understand them, and investigate their impact on metastatic relapse-free survival (MFS).Methods or Background: We included all consecutive adults with newly diagnosed locally-advanced STS managed at our sarcoma centre between 2008 and 2020, with contrast-enhanced (CE) baseline MRI. After MRI post-processing, segmentation and reproducibility assessment, 175 handcrafted radiomics features (h-RFs) from T1-weighted imaging (WI), T2-WI and fat-suppressed CE-T1-WI were calculated. Convolutional autoencoder neural network (CAE) and half-supervised CAE (HSCAE) were trained in repeated cross-validation on CE-T1-WI from one training cohort (n=200 patients) and validated on a testing cohort (n=25 patients), to extract 1024 deep radiomics features (d-RFs) per model. Following RNAseq of 110 samples, gene expression levels were calculated. Unsupervised classifications based on h-RFs, CAE, HSCAE and RNAseq were built with hierarchical clustering and explained according to histological features, radiological features, gene expression, pathway and survival analyses.Results or Findings: 225 patients were included (120 men [- 3%], median age: 62 years). Three radiomics classifications were obtained (h-RF, CAE and HSCAE groups), which were not associated with the transcriptomics groups, but with prognostic radiological features known to correlate with higher grade (all P-values<0.001), and Sarculator groups (all P-values<0.001). HSCAE and h-RF groups were also associated with MFS in multivariable Cox regressions (P =0.0146 and 0.0043, respectively). Combining these groups improved the prognostic performances of the transcriptomics groups alone (c-index=0.603, increasing to 0.666 with h-RF [P=0.0380] and 0.709 with HSCAE [P=0.0110]). Fifteen genes were dysregulated and two pathways were up-regulated in the h-RF groups, which were linked to tumorigenesis and immune response.
Conclusion: Radiophenotypes of STS on pre-treatment MRI obtained with handcrafted and deep radiomics were explainable by radiologists, independently associated with MFS and strengthened transcriptomics signature.Limitations: This is a retrospective single-centre study.Funding for this study: No funding was received for this study.Has your study been approved by an ethics committee? YesEthics committee - additional information: The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Bergonié Institute, comprehensive cancer centre of Bordeaux, France.