Multi-parametric MRI phenotype with trustworthy machine learning for differentiating CNS demyelinating diseases

BACKGROUND: Misdiagnosis of multiple sclerosis (MS) and neuromyelitis optica (NMO) may delay the treatment, resulting in poor prognosis. However, the precise identification of these two diseases is still challenging in clinical practice. We aimed to evaluate the value of quantitative radiomic features extracted from the brain white matter lesions for differential diagnosis of MS and NMO. METHODS: We recruited 116 CNS demyelinating patients including 78 MS, and 38 NMO. Three neuroradiologists performed visual differential diagnosis based on brain MRI for comparison purpose. A multi-level scheme was designed to harness the selection of discriminative and stable radiomics features extracted from brain while mater lesions in T1-MPRAGE, T2 sequences and clinical factors. Based on the imaging phenotype composed of the selected radiomic and clinical features, Multi-parametric Multivariate Random Forest (MM-RF) model was constructed and verified with both 10-fold cross-validation and independent testing. Result interpretation was provided to build trust in diagnostic decisions. RESULTS: Eighty-six patients were randomly selected to form the training set while the rest 30 patients for independent testing. On the training set, our MM-RF model achieved accuracy 0.849 and AUC 0.826 in 10-fold cross-validation, which were significantly higher than clinical visual analysis (0.709 and 0.683, p < 0.05). In the independent testing, the MM-RF model achieved AUC 0.902, accuracy 0.871, sensitivity 0.873, specificity 0.869, respectively. Furthermore, age, sex and EDSS were found mildly correlated with the radiomic features (p of all < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Multi-parametric radiomic features have potential as practical quantitative imaging biomarkers for differentiating MS from NMO. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12967-021-03015-w.