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Journal of Translational Medicine
Published in: Journal of Translational Medicine 1/2022

Open Access 01-12-2022 | Magnetic Resonance Imaging | Research

Radiomics features for assessing tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes correlate with molecular traits of triple-negative breast cancer

Authors: Guan-Hua Su, Yi Xiao, Lin Jiang, Ren-Cheng Zheng, He Wang, Yan Chen, Ya-Jia Gu, Chao You, Zhi-Ming Shao

Published in: Journal of Translational Medicine | Issue 1/2022

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Abstract

Background

Tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) have become a promising biomarker for assessing tumor immune microenvironment and predicting immunotherapy response. However, the assessment of TILs relies on invasive pathological slides.

Methods

We retrospectively extracted radiomics features from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to develop a radiomic cohort of triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) (n = 139), among which 116 patients underwent transcriptomic sequencing. This radiomic cohort was randomly divided into the training cohort (n = 98) and validation cohort (n = 41) to develop radiomic signatures to predict the level of TILs through a non-invasive method. Pathologically evaluated TILs in the H&E sections were set as the gold standard. Elastic net and logistic regression were utilized to perform radiomics feature selection and model training, respectively. Transcriptomics was utilized to infer the detailed composition of the tumor microenvironment and to validate the radiomic signatures.

Results

We selected three radiomics features to develop a TILs-predicting radiomics model, which performed well in the validation cohort (AUC 0.790, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.638–0.943). Further investigation with transcriptomics verified that tumors with high TILs predicted by radiomics (Rad-TILs) presented activated immune-related pathways, such as antigen processing and presentation, and immune checkpoints pathways. In addition, a hot immune microenvironment, including upregulated T cell infiltration gene signatures, cytokines, costimulators and major histocompatibility complexes (MHCs), as well as more CD8+ T cells, follicular helper T cells and memory B cells, was found in high Rad-TILs tumors.

Conclusions

Our study demonstrated the feasibility of radiomics model in predicting TILs status and provided a method to make the features interpretable, which will pave the way toward precision medicine for TNBC.
Appendix
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Metadata
Title
Radiomics features for assessing tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes correlate with molecular traits of triple-negative breast cancer
Authors
Guan-Hua Su
Yi Xiao
Lin Jiang
Ren-Cheng Zheng
He Wang
Yan Chen
Ya-Jia Gu
Chao You
Zhi-Ming Shao
Publication date
01-12-2022
Publisher
BioMed Central
Published in
Journal of Translational Medicine / Issue 1/2022
Electronic ISSN: 1479-5876
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1186/s12967-022-03688-x

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WHO estimates that half of all patients worldwide are non-adherent to their prescribed medication. The consequences of poor adherence can be catastrophic, on both the individual and population level.

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