Radiomics prediction model for the improved diagnosis of clinically significant prostate cancer on biparametric MRI

Background: To evaluate the potential of clinical-based model, a biparametric MRI-based radiomics model and a clinical-radiomics combined model for predicting clinically significant prostate cancer (PCa). Methods: In total, 381 patients with clinically suspicious PCa were included in this retrospective study; of those, 199 patients did not have PCa upon biopsy, while 182 patients had PCa. All patients underwent 3.0-T MRI examinations with the same acquisition parameters, and clinical risk factors associated with PCa (age, prostate volume, serum PSA, etc.) were collected. We randomly stratified the training and test sets using a 6:4 ratio. The radiomic features included gradient-based histogram features, grey-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM), run-length matrix (RLM), and grey-level size zone matrix (GLSZM). Three models were developed using multivariate logistic regression analysis to predict clinically significant PCa: a clinical model, a radiomics model and a clinical-radiomics combined model. The diagnostic performance and clinical net benefit of each model were compared via receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis and decision curves, respectively. Results: Both the radiomics model (AUC: 0.98) and the clinical-radiomics combined model (AUC: 0.98) achieved greater predictive efficacy than the clinical model (AUC: 0.79). The decision curve analysis also showed that the radiomics model and combined model had higher net benefits than the clinical model. Conclusions: Compared with the evaluation of clinical risk factors associated with PCa only, the radiomics-based machine learning model can improve the predictive accuracy for clinically significant PCa, in terms of both diagnostic performance and clinical net benefit.