Preoperative diagnosis of meningioma sinus invasion based on MRI radiomics and deep learning: a multicenter study.

Objective: Exploring the construction of a fusion model that combines radiomics and deep learning (DL) features is of great significance for the precise preoperative diagnosis of meningioma sinus invasion.

Materials and methods: This study retrospectively collected data from 601 patients with meningioma confirmed by surgical pathology. For each patient, 3948 radiomics features, 12,288 VGG features, 6144 ResNet features, and 3072 DenseNet features were extracted from MRI images. Thus, univariate logistic regression, correlation analysis, and the Boruta algorithm were applied for further feature dimension reduction, selecting radiomics and DL features highly associated with meningioma sinus invasion. Finally, diagnosis models were constructed using the random forest (RF) algorithm. Additionally, the diagnostic performance of different models was evaluated using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, and AUC values of different models were compared using the DeLong test.

Results: Ultimately, 21 features highly associated with meningioma sinus invasion were selected, including 6 radiomics features, 2 VGG features, 7 ResNet features, and 6 DenseNet features. Based on these features, five models were constructed: the radiomics model, VGG model, ResNet model, DenseNet model, and DL-radiomics (DLR) fusion model. This fusion model demonstrated superior diagnostic performance, with AUC values of 0.818, 0.814, and 0.769 in the training set, internal validation set, and independent external validation set, respectively. Furthermore, the results of the DeLong test indicated that there were significant differences between the fusion model and both the radiomics model and the VGG model (p < 0.05).

Conclusions: The fusion model combining radiomics and DL features exhibits superior diagnostic performance in preoperative diagnosis of meningioma sinus invasion. It is expected to become a powerful tool for clinical surgical plan selection and patient prognosis assessment.