Motivation: Contrast-free sequences are receiving increasing attention. As a novel technology, radiomics analysis of synthetic MRI (SyMRI) in breast treatment has not been widely explored. Goal(s): To investigate the radiomics features extracted from the contrast-free SyMRI and apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) in predicting pathological complete response in breast cancer. Approach: The support vector machine-based recursive feature elimination (SVM-RFE) was used to build models. The model performance was assessed by receiver operating characteristic curve and compared by Delong test. Results: Radiomics model based on delta-SyT2 and 1st-ADC achieved the optimal performance after one cycle treatment. After adding receptor status, the clinical-radiomics achieved the highest performance. Impact: Multiparametric SyMRI and ADC, as noncontrast sequences, have the potential to early predict NAC response in radiomics analysis, thus reducing the need for repeated contrast agent injections during treatment.
Zhang et al. (Tue,) studied this question.