Background

To investigate whether quantitative radiomic features extracted from digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) are associated with Ki-67 expression of breast cancer.

Materials and methods

This is a prospective ethically approved study of 70 women diagnosed with invasive breast cancer in 2018, including 40 low Ki-67 expression (Ki-67 proliferation index <14%) cases and 30 high Ki-67 expression (Ki-67 proliferation index ≥ 14%) cases. A set of 106 quantitative radiomic features, including morphological, grey/scale statistics, and texture features, were extracted from DBT images. After applying least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) method to select the most predictive features set for the classifiers, low versus high Ki-67 expression was evaluated by the area under the curve (AUC) at receiver operating characteristic analysis. Correlation coefficient was calculated for the most significant features.

Results

A combination of five features yielded AUC of up to 0.698. The five most predictive features (sphericity, autocorrelation, interquartile range, robust mean absolute deviation, and short-run high grey-level emphasis) showed a statistical significance (p ≤ 0.001) in the classification. Thirty-four features were significantly (p ≤ 0.001) correlated with Ki-67, and five of these had a correlation coefficient of > 0.5.

Conclusion

The present study showed that quantitative radiomic imaging features of breast tumour extracted from DBT images are associated with breast cancer Ki-67 expression. Larger studies are needed in order to further evaluate these findings.

中文翻译：

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通过数字乳腺断层合成放射线学功能预测乳腺癌Ki-67表达。

背景

调查从数字化乳房断层合成（DBT）中提取的定量放射学特征是否与乳腺癌的Ki-67表达有关。

材料和方法

这是一项获得伦理学认可的前瞻性研究，研究对象是2018年诊断为浸润性乳腺癌的70名妇女，其中40例Ki-67低表达（Ki-67增殖指数<14％）和30例Ki-67高表达（Ki-67增殖指数≥ 14％）的案件。从DBT图像中提取了106种定量放射学特征，包括形态，灰度/比例统计和纹理特征。在应用最小绝对收缩和选择算子（LASSO）方法来为分类器选择最具预测性的特征集之后，在接收器工作特性分析时，通过曲线下面积（AUC）评估了Ki-67的低表达与高表达。计算了最重要特征的相关系数。

结果

五个功能的组合产生的AUC高达0.698。五个最具有预测功能（球形，自相关，四分范围，稳健的平均绝对偏差，短期高灰度级重点）差异有统计学意义（p在分类≤0.001）。三十四个特点是显著（p ≤0.001），Ki-67的相关，并且这五个具有> 0.5的相关系数。

结论

本研究表明，从DBT图像提取的乳腺肿瘤的定量放射影像学特征与乳腺癌Ki-67表达有关。为了进一步评估这些发现，需要进行更大的研究。