A subregion-based survival prediction framework for GBM via multi-sequence MRI space optimization and clustering-based feature bundling and construction.

Aiming at accurate survival prediction of Glioblastoma (GBM) patients following radiation therapy, we developed a subregion-based survival prediction framework via a novel feature construction method on multi-sequence MRIs. The proposed method consists of two main steps: 1) a feature space optimization algorithm to determine the most appropriate matching relation derived between multi-sequence MRIs and tumor subregions, for using multimodal image data more reasonable; 2) a clustering-based feature bundling and construction algorithm to compress the high-dimensional extracted radiomic features and construct a smaller but effective set of features, for accurate prediction model construction. For each tumor subregion, a total of 680 radiomic features were extracted from one MRI sequence using Pyradiomics. Additional 71 geometric features and clinical information were collected resulting in an extreme high-dimensional feature space of 8,231 to train and evaluate the survival prediction at 1-year, and the more challenging overall survival prediction. The framework was developed based on 98 GBM patients from the BraTS 2020 dataset under 5-fold cross-validation, and tested on an external cohort of 19 GBM patients randomly selected from the same dataset. Finally, we identified the best matching relationship between each subregion and its corresponding MRI sequence, a subset of 235 features (out of 8,231 features) were generated by the proposed feature bundling and construction framework. The subregion-based survival prediction framework achieved AUCs of 0.998 and 0.983 on the training and independent test cohort respectively for 1-year survival prediction, compared to AUCs of 0.940 and 0.923 for survival prediction using the 8,231 initial extracted features for training and validation cohorts respectively. Finally, we further constructed an effective stacking structure ensemble regressor to predict the overall survival with the C-index of 0.872. The proposed subregion-based survival prediction framework allow us to better stratified patients towards personalized treatment of GBM.