Prediction of Early Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy Response of Breast Cancer through Deep Learning-based Pharmacokinetic Quantification of DCE MRI

“Just Accepted” papers have undergone full peer review and have been accepted for publication in Radiology: Artificial Intelligence. This article will undergo copyediting, layout, and proof review before it is published in its final version. Please note that during production of the final copyedited article, errors may be discovered which could affect the content. Purpose To improve the generalizability of pathologic complete response (pCR) prediction following neoadjuvant chemotherapy using deep learning (DL)-based retrospective pharmacokinetic quantification (RoQ) of early-treatment dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) MRI. Materials and Methods This multicenter retrospective study included breast MRI data from four publicly available datasets of patients with breast cancer acquired from May 2002 to November 2016. RoQ was performed using a previously developed DL model for clinical multiphasic DCE-MRI datasets. Radiomic analysis was performed on RoQ maps and conventional enhancement maps. These data, together with clinicopathologic variables and shape-based radiomic analysis, were subsequently applied in pCR prediction using logistic regression. Prediction performance was evaluated by area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). Results A total of 1073 female patients with breast cancer were included. The proposed method showed improved consistency and generalizability compared with the reference method, achieving higher AUCs across external datasets (0.82 [CI: 0.72–0.91], 0.75 [CI: 0.71–0.79], and 0.77 [CI: 0.66–0.86] for Datasets A2, B, and C, respectively). On Dataset A2 (from the same study as the training dataset), there was no significant difference in performance between the proposed method and reference method ( P = .80). Notably, on the combined external datasets, the proposed method significantly outperformed the reference method (AUC: 0.75 [CI: 0.72– 0.79] vs 0.71 [CI: 0.68–0.76], P = .003). Conclusion This work offers a novel approach to improve the generalizability and predictive accuracy of pCR response in breast cancer across diverse datasets, achieving higher and more consistent AUC scores than existing methods. ©RSNA, 2025