Deep radiomic features from MRI scans predict survival outcome of recurrent glioblastoma

Abstract: This paper proposes to use deep radiomic features (DRFs) from a convolutional neural network (CNN) to model fine-grained texture signatures in the radiomic analysis of recurrent glioblastoma (rGBM). We use DRFs to predict survival of rGBM patients with preoperative T1-weighted post-contrast MR images (n=100). DRFs are extracted from regions of interest labelled by a radiation oncologist and used to compare between short-term and long-term survival patient groups. Random forest (RF) classification is employed to predict survival outcome (i.e., short or long survival), as well as to identify highly group-informative descriptors. Classification using DRFs results in an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 89.15% (p<0.01) in predicting rGBM patient survival, compared to 78.07% (p<0.01) when using standard radiomic features (SRF). These results indicate the potential of DRFs as a prognostic marker for patients with rGBM.