An interpretable radiomics model to select patients for radiotherapy after surgery for WHO grade 2 meningiomas

OBJECTIVES: This study investigated whether radiomic features can improve the prediction accuracy for tumor recurrence over clinicopathological features and if these features can be used to identify high-risk patients requiring adjuvant radiotherapy (ART) in WHO grade 2 meningiomas. METHODS: Preoperative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of 155 grade 2 meningioma patients with a median follow-up of 63.8 months were included and allocated to training (n = 92) and test sets (n = 63). After radiomic feature extraction (n = 200), least absolute shrinkage and selection operator feature selection with logistic regression classifier was performed to develop two models: (1) a clinicopathological model and (2) a combined clinicopathological and radiomic model. The probability of recurrence using the combined model was analyzed to identify candidates for ART. RESULTS: The combined clinicopathological and radiomics model exhibited superior performance for the prediction of recurrence compared with the clinicopathological model in the training set (area under the curve [AUC] 0.78 vs. 0.67, P = 0.042), which was also validated in the test set (AUC 0.77 vs. 0.61, P = 0.192). In patients with a high probability of recurrence by the combined model, the 5-year progression-free survival was significantly improved with ART (92% vs. 57%, P = 0.024), and the median time to recurrence was longer (54 vs. 17 months after surgery). CONCLUSIONS: Radiomics significantly contributes added value in predicting recurrence when integrated with the clinicopathological features in patients with grade 2 meningiomas. Furthermore, the combined model can be applied to identify high-risk patients who require ART. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13014-022-02090-7.