Radiogenomics Analysis Reveals Tumor Heterogeneity of Triple-Negative Breast Cancer

Abstract Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is a subset of breast cancer with adverse prognosis and significant tumor heterogeneity. Here, we used MRI images from a breast cancer cohort consisting of 860 patients to construct a radiomic signature that could identify TNBC with an AUC of 0.92 (95% CI: 0.887 to 0.953) and validated in another cohort. Moreover, we developed radiomic signatures to distinguish TNBC subtypes with moderate efficacy. Furthermore, we identified peritumoral dependence nonuniformity of the gray level dependence matrix, which captures the intratumor heterogeneity in the tumor boundary, as the most significant prognostic factor (P = 0.04 for recurrence-free survival and P = 0.02 for overall survival). The integration of transcriptomic and metabolomic data indicated that high peritumor heterogeneity was related to immune suppression and enhanced metabolism. Our findings suggest that radiomics data can serve as a noninvasive predictor for molecular subtyping and clinical outcome in patients with TNBC.