MRI-based intra-tumoral ecological diversity features and temporal characteristics for predicting microvascular invasion in hepatocellular carcinoma

Objective To investigate the predictive value of radiomics models based on intra-tumoral ecological diversity (iTED) and temporal characteristics for assessing microvascular invasion (MVI) in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Material and Methods We retrospectively analyzed the data of 398 HCC patients who underwent dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI with Gd-EOB-DTPA (training set: 318; testing set: 80). The tumors were segmented into five distinct habitats using case-level clustering and a Gaussian mixture model was used to determine the optimal clusters based on the Bayesian information criterion to produce an iTED feature vector for each patient, which was used to assess intra-tumoral heterogeneity. Radiomics models were developed using iTED features from the arterial phase (AP), portal venous phase (PVP), and hepatobiliary phase (HBP), referred to as M iTED-AP , M iTED-PVP , and M iTED-HBP , respectively. Additionally, temporal features were derived by subtracting the PVP features from the AP features, creating a delta-radiomics model (M Delta ). Conventional radiomics features were also extracted from the AP, PVP, and HBP images, resulting in three models: M CVT-AP , M CVT-PVP , and M CVT-HBP . A clinical-radiological model (CR model) was constructed, and two fusion models were generated by combining the radiomics or/and CR models using a stacking algorithm (fusion_R and fusion_CR). Model performance was evaluated using AUC, accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. Results The M Delta model demonstrated higher sensitivity compared to the M CVT-AP and M CVT-PVP models. No significant differences in performance were observed across different imaging phases for either conventional radiomics ( p = 0.096–0.420) or iTED features ( p = 0.106–0.744). Similarly, for images from the same phase, we found no significant differences between the performance of conventional radiomics and iTED features (AP: p = 0.158; PVP: p = 0.844; HBP: p = 0.157). The fusion_R and fusion_CR models enhanced MVI discrimination, achieving AUCs of 0.823 (95% CI: 0.816–0.831) and 0.830 (95% CI: 0.824–0.835), respectively. Conclusion Delta radiomics features are temporal and predictive of MVI, providing additional predictive information for MVI beyond conventional AP and PVP features. The iTED features provide an alternative perspective in interpreting tumor characteristics and hold the potential to replace conventional radiomics features to some extent for MVI prediction.