MRI-Based Radiomics for Differentiating Orbital Cavernous Hemangioma and Orbital Schwannoma

Aim: The purpose of this work was to develop and evaluate magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-based radiomics for differentiation of orbital cavernous hemangioma (OCH) and orbital schwannoma (OSC). Methods: Fifty-eight patients (40 OCH and 18 OSC, confirmed pathohistologically) screened out from 216 consecutive patients who presented between 2015 and 2020 were divided into a training group (28 OCH and 12 OSC) and a validation group (12 OCH and 6 OSC). Radiomics features were extracted from T1-weighted imaging (T1WI) and T2-weighted imaging (T2WI). T-tests, the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), and principal components analysis (PCA) were used to select features for use in the classification models. A logistic regression (LR) model, support vector machine (SVM) model, decision tree (DT) model, and random forest (RF) model were constructed to differentiate OCH from OSC. The models were evaluated according to their accuracy and the area under the receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC). Results: Six features from T1WI, five features from T2WI, and eight features from combined T1WI and T2WI were finally selected for building the classification models. The models using T2WI features showed superior performance on the validation data than those using T1WI features, especially the LR model and SVM model, which showed accuracy of 93% (85–100%) and 92%, respectively, The SVM model showed high accuracy of 93% (91–96%) on the combined feature group with an AUC of 98% (97–99%). The DT and RF models did not perform as well as the SVM model. Conclusion: Radiomics analysis using an SVM model achieved an accuracy of 93% for distinguishing OCH and OSC, which may be helpful for clinical diagnosis.