Whole tumour- and subregion-based radiomics of contrast-enhanced mammography in differentiating HER2 expression status of invasive breast cancers: A double-centre pilot study

To explore the value of whole tumour- and subregion-based radiomics of contrast-enhanced mammography (CEM) in differentiating the HER2 expression status of breast cancers.

352 patients underwent preoperative CEM from two centres were consecutively enroled and divided into the training, internal validation, and external validation cohorts. The lesions were divided into HER2-positive and HER2-negative groups. Besides the radiological features, radiomics features capturing the whole tumour-based (wITH) and subregion-based intratumoral heterogeneity (sITH) were extracted from the craniocaudal view of CEM recombined images. The XGBoost classifier was applied to develop the radiological, sITH, and wITH models. A combined model was constructed by fusing the prediction results of the three models.

The mean age of the patients was 51.1 ± 10.7 years. Two radiological features, four wITH features, and three sITH features were selected to establish the models. The combined model significantly improved the AUC to 0.80 ± 0.03 (95% CI: 0.73–0.86), 0.79 ± 0.06 (95% CI: 0.67–0.90), and 0.79 ± 0.05 (95% CI: 0.69–0.89) in the training, internal validation, and external validation cohorts, respectively (All P < 0.05). The combined model showed good agreement between the predicted and observed probabilities and favourable net clinical benefit in the validation cohorts.

Both whole tumour- and subregion-based ITH radiomics features of CEM exhibited potential for differentiating the HER2 expression status. Combining conventional radiological features and ITH features can improve the model’s performance.