Aim: The purpose of this study was to develop a radiomic-based machine-learning model to predict triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) based on the contralateral unaffected breast's fibroglandular tissue (FGT) in breast cancer patients.
Materials and methods: This study retrospectively included 541 patients (mean age, 51 years; range, 26-82) who underwent a screening breast MRI between November 2016 and September 2018 and who were subsequently diagnosed with biopsy-confirmed, treatment-naïve breast cancer. Patients were divided into training (n = 250) and validation (n = 291) sets. In the training set, 132 radiomic features were extracted using the open-source CERR platform. Following feature selection, the final prediction model was created, based on a support vector machine with a polynomial kernel of order 2.
Results: In the validation set, the final prediction model, which included four radiomic features, achieved an F1 score of 0.66, an area under the curve of 0.71, a sensitivity of 54% [47-60%], a specificity of 74% [65-84%], a positive predictive value of 84% [78-90%], and a negative predictive value of 39% [31-47%].
Conclusions: TNBC can be predicted based on radiomic features extracted from the FGT of the contralateral unaffected breast of patients, suggesting the potential for risk prediction specific to TNBC.
Keywords: breast cancer; fibroglandular tissue; radiomics; triple-negative breast cancer.