Intratumoral and peritumoral radiomics for preoperatively predicting the axillary non-sentinel lymph node metastasis in breast cancer on the basis of contrast-enhanced mammography: a multicenter study

Objective: To develop and test a contrast-enhanced mammography (CEM)-based radiomics model using intratumoral and peritumoral regions to predict non-sentinel lymph node (NSLN) metastasis in breast cancer before surgery. Methods: This multicenter study included 365 breast cancer patients with sentinel lymph node metastasis. Intratumoral regions of interest (ROIs) were manually delineated, and peritumoral ROIs (5 and 10 mm) were automatically obtained. Five models, including intratumoral model, peritumoral (5 and 10 mm) models, and intratumoral+peritumoral (5 and 10 mm) models, were constructed by support vector machine classifier on the basis of optimal features selected by variance threshold, SelectKbest, and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator algorithms. The predictive performance of radiomics models was evaluated by receiver operating characteristic curves. An external testing set was used to test the model. The Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) model was used to compare the predictive performance with radiomics model. Results: The intratumoral ROI and intratumoral+peritumoral 10-mm ROI-based radiomics model achieved the best performance with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.8000 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.6871–0.8266) in the internal testing set. In the external testing set, the AUC of radiomics model was 0.7567 (95% CI: 0.6717–0.8678), higher than that of MSKCC model (AUC = 0.6681, 95% CI: 0.5148–0.8213) (p = 0.361). Conclusions: The intratumoral and peritumoral radiomics based on CEM had an acceptable predictive performance in predicting NSLN metastasis in breast cancer, which could be seen as a supplementary predicting tool to help clinicians make appropriate surgical plans. Advances in knowledge: The intratumoral and peritumoral CEM-based radiomics model could noninvasively predict NSLN metastasis in breast cancer patients before surgery.