Abstract PO2-02-11: Radiomics and an Erosion Model to Predict Post-Neoadjuvant Therapy Tumor Characteristics for Personalized Breast Cancer Treatment
Authors: Feiger Bradley , Pfeiffer John , Cole John , Antony Anuja , Peterson Joseph 
Published: May 2024

Background:

Neoadjuvant therapy (NAT) has become a standard-of-care (SOC) for patients diagnosed with locally advanced or early-stage breast cancer. A critical step towards optimizing treatment selection and coordinating surgical care is to estimate the tumor’s response to NAT. While pathological complete response (pCR) is commonly used to measure NAT effectiveness, patients who do not achieve pCR still benefit from NAT depending on the tumor’s response. A reduction in tumor extent could alter the surgical approach from mastectomy to breast conserving therapy and improve recurrence and overall survival. In this study we used pre-treatment imaging data to provide a comprehensive prediction of clinically relevant metrics including tumor volume, tumor convex hull volume, and spatially derived metrics; this research represents an important advancement in predicting NAT effectiveness.

Methods:

262 breast cancer patients from 5 institutions who underwent NAT with pre- and post-NAT dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) were included in this study. Each MRI was automatically segmented using a convolutional neural network with manual edits and verification. Radiomic features were extracted from the pre-NAT MRI and tumor segmentation. Significant radiomic features were selected based on their correlation with post-NAT volume, feature-to-feature correlation, and LASSO regression. Altogether, 12 and 17 radiomic features were selected for volume and convex hull volume prediction, respectively. The selected features were inputted into a Huber loss regression model to predict either the post-NAT tumor volume or the convex hull volume (surgical excision volume). To enable spatial and morphological comparison between the predicted and post-NAT tumor, an erosion model was developed in which the pre-NAT and post-NAT MRIs were co-registered, and the pre-NAT tumor was symmetrically eroded until its volume matched the predicted volume. Clinically relevant metrics such as the distance from the tumor to the nipple, skin, and chest were computed to assess the morphological and spatial prediction capabilities of the model. All models were tested on patients from cohort holdout sets (n=110) unseen during training.

Results:

The volume prediction analysis yielded promising results, with an R^2 value of 0.62 for post-NAT tumor volume prediction and an R^2 value of 0.56 for post-NAT tumor convex hull volume prediction. The mean volume and convex hull volume error was 1.1 cc and 1.3 cc, respectively. Table 1 provides an overview of the morphological and spatial comparisons between the predicted and post-NAT tumors. Overall, the predicted tumors demonstrated close agreement with their post-NAT counterparts.

Conclusion:

This study demonstrates a successful approach towards estimating post-NAT tumor volume, convex hull volume, and morphological and spatial characteristics. By providing reliable estimates of post-NAT tumor characteristics using SOC pre-NAT data, our predictive models enable personalized treatment planning and patient stratification to optimize patient care.

Table 1. Predicted vs. post-NAT tumor comparison.

Results demonstrate accurate predictions for clinically relevant distance metrics.

Citation Format: Bradley Feiger, John Pfeiffer, John Cole, Anuja Antony, Joseph Peterson. Radiomics and an Erosion Model to Predict Post-Neoadjuvant Therapy Tumor Characteristics for Personalized Breast Cancer Treatment [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 2023 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium; 2023 Dec 5-9; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2024;84(9 Suppl):Abstract nr PO2-02-11.