Radiopathomics: Integration of radiographic and histologic characteristics for prognostication in glioblastoma

Both radiographic (Rad) imaging, such as multi-parametric magnetic resonance imaging, and digital pathology (Path) images captured from tissue samples are currently acquired as standard clinical practice for glioblastoma tumors. Both these data streams have been separately used for diagnosis and treatment planning, despite the fact that they provide complementary information. In this research work, we aimed to assess the potential of both Rad and Path images in combination and comparison. An extensive set of engineered features was extracted from delineated tumor regions in Rad images, comprising T1, T1-Gd, T2, T2-FLAIR, and 100 random patches extracted from Path images. Specifically, the features comprised descriptors of intensity, histogram, and texture, mainly quantified via gray-level-co-occurrence matrix and gray-level-run-length matrices. Features extracted from images of 107 glioblastoma patients, downloaded from The Cancer Imaging Archive, were run through support vector machine for classification using leave-one-out cross-validation mechanism, and through support vector regression for prediction of continuous survival outcome. The Pearson correlation coefficient was estimated to be 0.75, 0.74, and 0.78 for Rad, Path and RadPath data. The area-under the receiver operating characteristic curve was estimated to be 0.74, 0.76 and 0.80 for Rad, Path and RadPath data, when patients were discretized into long- and short-survival groups based on average survival cutoff. Our results support the notion that synergistically using Rad and Path images may lead to better prognosis at the initial presentation of the disease, thereby facilitating the targeted enrollment of patients into clinical trials.