Developing a novel image marker to predict the clinical outcome of neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NACT) for ovarian cancer patients

Objective Neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NACT) is one kind of treatment for advanced stage ovarian cancer patients. However, due to the nature of tumor heterogeneity, the clinical outcome to NACT vary significantly among different subgroups. The patients with partial responses to NACT may lead to suboptimal debulking surgery, which will result in adverse prognosis. To address this clinical challenge, the purpose of this study is to develop a novel image marker to achieve high accuracy prognosis prediction of the NACT at an early stage. Methods For this purpose, we first computed a total of 1373 radiomics features to quantify the tumor characteristics, which can be grouped into three categories: geometric, intensity, and texture features. Second, all these features were optimized by principal component analysis algorithm to generate a compact and informative feature cluster. This cluster was used as input for developing and optimizing support vector machine (SVM) based classifiers, which indicated the likelihood of the patient receiving suboptimal cytoreduction after the NACT treatment. Two different kernels for SVM algorithm were explored and compared. To validate this scheme, a total of 42 ovarian cancer patients were retrospectively collected. A nested leave-one-out cross-validation framework was adopted for model performance assessment. Results The results demonstrated that the model with a Gaussian radial basis function kernel SVM yielded an AUC (area under the ROC [receiver characteristic operation] curve) of 0.806 ± 0.078. Meanwhile, this model achieved overall accuracy (ACC) of 83.3%, positive predictive value (PPV) of 81.8%, and negative predictive value (NPV) of 83.9%. Conclusion This study provides meaningful information for the development of radiomics based image markers in NACT treatment outcome prediction.