MIL normalization —— prerequisites for accurate MRI radiomics analysis

The quality of magnetic resonance (MR) images obtained with different instruments and imaging parameters varies greatly. A large number of heterogeneous images are collected, and they suffer from acquisition variation. Such imaging quality differences will have a great impact on the radiomics analysis. The main differences in MR images include modality mismatch (M), intensity distribution variance (I), and layer-spacing differences (L), which are referred to as MIL differences in this paper for convenience. An MIL normalization system is proposed to reconstruct uneven MR images into high-quality data with complete modality, a uniform intensity distribution and consistent layer spacing. Three radiomics tasks, including tumor segmentation, pathological grading and genetic diagnosis of glioma, were used to verify the effect of MIL normalization on radiomics analysis. Three retrospective glioma datasets were analyzed in this study: BraTs (285 cases), TCGA (112 cases) and HuaShan (403 cases). They were used to test the effect of MIL on three different radiomics tasks, including tumor segmentation, pathological grading and genetic diagnosis. MIL normalization included three components: multimodal synthesis based on an encoder-decoder network, intensity normalization based on CycleGAN, and layer-spacing unification based on Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM). The Dice similarity coefficient, areas under the curve (AUC) and six other indicators were calculated and compared after different normalization steps. The MIL normalization system can improved the Dice coefficient of segmentation by 9% (P < .001), the AUC of pathological grading by 32% (P < .001), and IDH1 status prediction by 25% (P < .001) when compared to non-normalization. The proposed MIL normalization system provides high-quality standardized data, which is a prerequisite for accurate radiomics analysis.