Radiomics models based on multi-sequence MRI for preoperative evaluation of MUC4 status in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma: a preliminary study

BACKGROUND: Mucin 4 (MUC4) overexpression promotes tumorigenesis and increases the aggressiveness of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). To date, no study has reported the association between radiomics and MUC4 expression in PDAC. Thus, we aimed to explore the utility of radiomics based on multi-sequence magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to predict the status of MUC4 expression in PDAC preoperatively. METHODS: This retrospective study included 52 patients with PDAC who underwent MRI. The patients were divided into two groups based on MUC4 expression status. Two feature sets were extracted from the arterial and portal phases (PPs) of dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI). Univariate analysis, minimum redundancy maximum relevance (MRMR), and principal component analysis (PCA) were performed for the feature selection of each dataset, and features with a cumulative variance of 90% were selected to develop radiomics models. Clinical characteristics were gathered to develop a clinical model. The selected radiomics features and clinical characteristics were modeled by multivariable logistic regression. The combined model integrated radiomics features from different selected data sets and clinical characteristics. The classification metrics were applied to assess the discriminatory power of the models. RESULTS: There were 22 PDACs with a high expression of MUC4 and 30 PDACs with a low expression of MUC4. The area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) values of the arterial phase (AP) model, the PP model, and the combined model were 0.732 (0.591–0.872), 0.709 (0.569–0.849), and 0.861 (0.760–0.961), respectively. The AUC of the clinical model was 0.666 (0.600–0.682). The combined model that was constructed outperformed the AP, the PP, and the clinical models (P<0.05, although no statistical significance was observed in the combined model vs. AP model). CONCLUSIONS: Radiomics models based on multi-sequence MRI have the potential to predict MUC4 expression levels in PDAC.