Radiomic white matter parameters of functional integrity of the corticospinal tract in high-grade glioma

Abstract

Tractography has become a widely available tool for the planning of neurosurgical operations as well as for neuroscientific research. The absence of patient interaction makes it easily applicable. However, it leaves uncertainty about the functional relevance of the identified bundles. We retrospectively analyzed the correlation of white matter markers with their clinical function in 24 right-handed patients who underwent first surgery for high-grade glioma. Morphological affection of the corticospinal tract (CST) and grade of paresis were assessed before surgery. Tractography was performed manually with MRTrix3 and automatically with TractSeg. Median and mean fractional anisotropy (FA) from manual tractography showed a significant correlation with CST affection (p = 0.008) and paresis (p = 0.015, p = 0.026). CST affection correlated further most with energy, and surface-volume ratio (p = 0.014) from radiomic analysis. Paresis correlated most with maximum 2D column diameter (p = 0.005), minor axis length (p = 0.006), and kurtosis (p = 0.008) from radiomic analysis. Streamline count yielded no significant correlations. In conclusion, mean or median FA can be used for the assessment of CST integrity in high-grade glioma. Also, several radiomic parameters are suited to describe tract integrity and may be used to quantitatively analyze white matter in the future.

Reproducibility of radiomic features of the brain on ultrahigh-resolution MRI at 7 Tesla: a comparison of different segmentation techniques

“…While these well-established metrics capture the quality of the segmentation, they do not assess quantitative differences between segmentations in terms of voxel-based gray-level statistics and patterns contained therein. This information, which is captured by radiomic features, is currently evaluated in a wide array of diseases of the brain, with recent MRI applications including detection of cognitive impairment [8], distinguishing between active and chronic multiple myeloma lesions [9], EGFR and HER2 status prediction in adenocarcinoma brain metastases [5], corticospinal tract involvement in glioma [4], and prediction of local tumor control in patients with brain metastases following postoperative radiotherapy [6].…”

“…The prior evaluation of Cerebrum-7T used three measures of segmentation similarity for evaluation of segmentation accuracy, with an emphasis on the Dice coefficient [2], but did not explore the impact of differences in segmentation masks on radiomic features at 7T that capture intra-volume properties such as signal heterogeneity. This topic is of interest because radiomic features -which are now widely used for the analysis of both focal brain lesions and diffuse abnormalities within the brain [3][4][5][6][7][8][9]-are sensitive to the type of segmentation method [10][11][12][13][14].…”