Radiomics-Based Pretherapeutic Prediction of Non-response to Neoadjuvant Therapy in Locally Advanced Rectal Cancer

The aim of this study was to investigate whether pretherapeutic, multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) radiomic features can be used for predicting non-response to neoadjuvant therapy in patients with locally advanced rectal cancer (LARC).

We retrospectively enrolled 425 patients with LARC [allocated in a 3:1 ratio to a primary (n = 318) or validation (n = 107) cohort] who received neoadjuvant therapy before surgery. All patients underwent T1-weighted, T2-weighted, diffusion-weighted, and contrast-enhanced T1-weighted MRI scans before receiving neoadjuvant therapy. We extracted 2424 radiomic features from the pretherapeutic, multiparametric MR images of each patient. The Wilcoxon rank-sum test, Spearman correlation analysis, and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator regression were successively performed for feature selection, whereupon a multiparametric MRI-based radiomic model was established by means of multivariate logistic regression analysis. This feature selection and multivariate logistic regression analysis was also performed on all single-modality MRI data to establish four single-modality radiomic models. The performance of the five radiomic models was evaluated by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis in both cohorts.

The multiparametric, MRI-based radiomic model based on 16 features showed good predictive performance in both the primary (p < 0.01) and validation (p < 0.05) cohorts, and performed better than all single-modality models. The area under the ROC curve of this multiparametric MRI-based radiomic model achieved a score of 0.822 (95% CI 0.752–0.891).

We demonstrated that pretherapeutic, multiparametric MRI radiomic features have potential in predicting non-response to neoadjuvant therapy in patients with LARC.