Abstract BACKGROUND Patient heterogeneity is a key challenge in immunotherapy for IDH-wildtype glioblastoma (GBM), where hypermutated tumors or highly immunosuppressive tumor microenvironments (TME) act as clinical outliers affecting treatment response and trial stratification. We developed Alert-GBM, a radiogenomic AI model designed to flag such outliers based on radiomic signatures from diagnostic imaging. MATERIAL AND METHODS We used multicenter open-access radiogenomic datasets (n = 176) to train unsupervised outlier detection models. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) served as a first-pass filter to harmonize data before applying Isolation Forest (IF) modeling. Three IF models were trained using inter-dataset leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) to simulate real-world performance and were benchmarked against each other. The final model was selected using stratified 10-fold cross-validation (CV). Outliers were validated through visual inspection, statistical profiling, comparison with other outlier detection methods (Local Outlier Factor, One-Class SVM, Mahalanobis distance), and correlation with biological and immune profiles from imaging and omics data. RESULTS The PCA filter identified 3 initial outliers based on MRI metadata. The final IF model, following stratified 10-fold CV, detected 6 outliers across the datasets, with anomaly scores plotted. Flagged cases included large, highly enhancing tumors, minimally enhancing tumors, and post-operative scans. Visualizations using PCA, t-SNE, and UMAP were generated to illustrate separability. False positives and negatives were assessed using immune-based scores, and the distribution of anomaly scores was analyzed with KDE plots. Cross-validation against alternative outlier models confirmed consistency of the flagged cases. CONCLUSION Alert-GBM is a proof-of-concept AI architecture for outlier detection in GBM MRI radiogenomics, capable of flagging cases with atypical immune TME profiles. Integrating such models with radiogenomic immune predictors at the time of diagnosis may support multidisciplinary decision-making and improve patient stratification for immunotherapy trials. Incorporating a human-in-the-loop framework ensures that AI outputs remain clinically interpretable and actionable.
Ghimire et al. (Wed,) studied this question.