Purpose: This study aims to develop and compare human-engineered radiomics methodologies that use multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) to diagnose breast cancer.

Approach: The dataset comprises clinical multiparametric MR images of 852 unique lesions from 612 patients. Each MR study included a dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE)-MRI sequence and a T2-weighted (T2w) MRI sequence, and a subset of 389 lesions were also imaged with a diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) sequence. Lesions were automatically segmented using the fuzzy C-means algorithm. Radiomic features were extracted from each MRI sequence. Two approaches, feature fusion and classifier fusion, to utilizing multiparametric information were investigated. A support vector machine classifier was trained for each method to differentiate between benign and malignant lesions. Area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) was used to evaluate and compare diagnostic performance. Analyses were first performed on the entire dataset and then on the subset that was imaged using the three-sequence protocol.

Results: When using the full dataset, the single-parametric classifiers yielded the following AUCs and 95% confidence intervals: AUC_DCE  =  0.84 [0.82, 0.87], AUC_T2w  =  0.83 [0.80, 0.86], and AUC_DWI  =  0.69 [0.62, 0.75]. The two multiparametric classifiers both yielded AUCs of 0.87 [0.84, 0.89] and significantly outperformed all single-parametric methods classifiers. When using the three-sequence subset, the mpMRI classifiers’ performances significantly decreased.

Conclusions: The proposed mpMRI radiomics methods can improve the performance of computer-aided diagnostics for breast cancer and handle missing sequences in the imaging protocol.