Evaluating treatment response to neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy in rectal cancer using various MRI-based radiomics models

Background To validate and compare various MRI-based radiomics models to evaluate treatment response to neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy (nCRT) of rectal cancer. Methods A total of 80 patients with locally advanced rectal cancer (LARC) who underwent surgical resection after nCRT were enrolled retrospectively. Rectal MR images were scanned pre- and post-nCRT. The radiomics features were extracted from T2-weighted images, then reduced separately by least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) and principal component analysis (PCA). Four classifiers of Logistic Regression, Random Forest (RF), Decision Tree and K-nearest neighbor (KNN) models were constructed to assess the tumor regression grade (TRG) and pathologic complete response (pCR), respectively. The diagnostic performances of models were determined with leave-one-out cross-validation by generating receiver operating characteristic curves and decision curve analysis. Results Three features related to the TRG and 11 features related to the pCR were obtained by LASSO. Top five principal components representing a cumulative contribution of 80% to overall features were selected by PCA. For TRG, the area under the curve (AUC) of RF model was 0.943 for LASSO and 0.930 for PCA, higher than other models ( P  < 0.05 for both). As for pCR, the AUCs of KNN for LASSO and PCA were 0.945 and 0.712, higher than other models ( P  < 0.05 for both). The DCA showed that LASSO algorithm was clinically superior to PCA. Conclusion MRI-based radiomics models demonstrated good performance for evaluating the treatment response of LARC after nCRT and LASSO algorithm yielded more clinical benefit.