Development of Clinical-Radiomics Nomogram for Predicting Post-Surgery Functional Improvement in High-Grade Glioma Patients

Introduction: Glioma Grade 4 (GG4) tumors, which include both IDH-mutated and IDH wild-type astrocytomas, are the most prevalent and aggressive form of primary brain tumor. Radiomics is gaining ground in neuro-oncology. The integration of this data into machine learning models has the potential to improve the accuracy of prognostic models for GG4 patients. Karnofsky Performance Status (KPS), an established preoperative prognostic factor for survival, is commonly used in these patients. In this study, we developed a nomogram to identify patients with improved functional performance as indicated by an increase in KPS after surgery by analyzing radiomic features from preoperative 3D MRI scans. Methods: Quantitative imaging features were extracted from the -3D T1 GRE sequence of 157 patients from a single center and were used to develop the machine learning (ML) model. To improve applicability and create a nomogram, multivariable logistic regression analysis was performed to build a model incorporating clinical characteristics and radiomics features. Results: We labeled 55 cases in which KPS was improved after surgery (35%, KPS-flag = 1). The resulting model was evaluated according to test series results. The best model was obtained by XGBoost using the features extracted by pyradiomics, with a Matthew coefficient score (MCC) of 0.339 (95% CI: 0.330–0.3483) in cross-validation. The out-of-sample evaluation on the test set yielded an MCC of 0.302. A nomogram evaluating the improvement of KPS post-surgery was built based on statistically significant variables from multivariate logistic regression including clinical and radiomics data (c-index = 0.760, test set). Conclusions: MRI radiomic analysis represents a powerful tool to predict postoperative functional outcomes, as evaluated by KPS.