Differentiation of invasive ductal and lobular carcinoma of the breast using MRI radiomic features: a pilot study

Abstract

Background Breast cancer (BC) is one of the main causes of cancer-related mortality among women. For clinical management to help patients survive longer and spend less time on treatment, early and precise cancer identification and differentiation of breast lesions are crucial. To investigate the accuracy of radiomic features (RF) extracted from dynamic contrast-enhanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DCE MRI) for differentiating invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC) from invasive lobular carcinoma (ILC). Methods This is a retrospective study. The IDC of 30 and ILC of 28 patients from Dukes breast cancer MRI data set of The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA), were included. The RF were extracted from the DCE-MRI sequence using a 3D slicer. The relevance of RF for differentiating IDC from ILC was evaluated using the maximum relevance minimum redundancy (mRMR) and Mann-Whitney test. Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was performed to ascertain the accuracy of RF in distinguishing between IDC and ILC. Results Ten DCE MRI-based RFs used in our study showed a significant difference (p <0.001) between IDC and ILC. We noticed that DCE RF, such as Gray level run length matrix (GLRLM) gray level variance (sensitivity (SN) 97.21%, specificity (SP) 96.2%, area under curve (AUC) 0.998), Gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) difference average (SN 95.72%, SP 96.34%, AUC 0.983), GLCM interquartile range (SN 95.24%, SP 97.31%, AUC 0.968), had the strongest ability to differentiate IDC and ILC. Conclusions MRI-based RF derived from DCE sequences can be used in clinical settings to differentiate malignant lesions of the breast, such as IDC and ILC, without requiring intrusive procedures.