A Quantitative Assessment of Pre-Operative MRI Reports in Glioma Patients: Report Metrics and IDH Prediction Ability

OBJECTIVES: To measure the metrics of glioma pre-operative MRI reports and build IDH prediction models. METHODS: Pre-operative MRI reports of 144 glioma patients in a single institution were collected retrospectively. Words were transformed to lowercase letters. White spaces, punctuations, and stop words were removed. Stemming was performed. A word cloud method applied to processed text matrix visualized language behavior. Spearman’s rank correlation assessed the correlation between the subjective descriptions of the enhancement pattern. The T1-contrast images associated with enhancement descriptions were selected. The keywords associated with IDH status were evaluated by χ2 value ranking. Random forest, k-nearest neighbors and Support Vector Machine algorithms were used to train models based on report features and age. All statistical analysis used two-tailed test with significance at p <.05. RESULTS: Longer word counts occurred in reports of older patients, higher grade gliomas, and wild type IDH gliomas. We identified 30 glioma enhancement descriptions, eight of which were commonly used: peripheral, heterogeneous, irregular, nodular, thick, rim, large, and ring. Five of eight patterns were correlated. IDH mutant tumors were characterized by words related to normal, symmetric or negative findings. IDH wild type tumors were characterized words by related to pathological MR findings like enhancement, necrosis and FLAIR foci. An integrated KNN model based on report features and age demonstrated high-performance (AUC: 0.89, 95% CI: 0.88–0.90). CONCLUSION: Report length depended on age, glioma grade, and IDH status. Description of glioma enhancement was varied. Report descriptions differed for IDH wild and mutant gliomas. Report features can be used to predict glioma IDH status.