Diagnosis model of the white matter injury of premature infants based on ultrasonography radiomics / 中华超声影像学杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective:To investigate the value of the ultrasonography in the diagnosis of the white matter injury of premature infants based on gray-scale ultrasonography radiomics.Methods:A total of 256 premature infants in Huazhong University of Science and Technology Union Shenzhen Hospital and Shenzhen Hospital of Southern Medical University from August 2018 to April 2022 were analyzed retrospectively. The computer-generated random numbers were assigned to the training set and the verification set according to 6∶4 ratio. On the basis of standardized collection of craniocerebral ultrasound images, the radiomics features were extracted from imaging by Pyradiomics 3.0.1 software package, the Mann-Whitney U test and the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) and stepwise regression were used to select the optimal features. Then the Logistic regression was used to build radiomics model. According to MRI, ROC curve was utilized to evaluate the performance of the model. The craniocerebral ultrasound images in the validation set were independently diagnosed by a senior physician and a junior physician, and then the above two physicians diagnosed again with the help of the radiomics, and the diagnostic abilities of this model were compared with those of the junior and senior physicians with and without radiomics assist. Results:A total of 5 optimal features were selected to develop radiomics model. The sensitivity, specificity, accuracy and the area under the ROC curve (AUC) in the training and validation sets were 0.861, 0.775, 0.799, 0.818; 0.929, 0.824, 0.853, 0.876, respectively. The sensitivity, specificity, accuracy and AUC in the senior sonographer, the junior sonographer, and both of them with radiomics assist for the dagnosis in the validation set were 0.929, 0.892, 0.902, 0.910; 0.714, 0.743, 0.735, 0.729; 0.929, 0.919, 0.922, 0.924; 0.857, 0.824, 0.833, 0.841, respectively. Performance of radiomics model reached the level of the senior sonographer (AUC 0.876 vs 0.910, P=0.284), which was significantly better than the performance of the junior sonographer(AUC 0.876 vs 0.729, P=0.001). Performance of the junior sonographer with radiomics assist was significantly better than the performance of the junior sonographer(AUC 0.841 vs 0.729, P=0.003). Performance of the senior sonographer with radiomics assist was comparable to that of the senior sonographer(AUC 0.924 vs 0.910, P=0.156). Conclusions:The ultrasound diagnosis method based on radiomics technology shows good diagnostic performance for the white matter injury of premature infants. It is helpful to improve the diagnostic ability of junior sonographer. It is expected to assist the sonographers in diagnosis and provide objective, consistent and accurate results for clinical practice.