Glioblastoma Multiforme Prognosis: MRI Missing Modality Generation, Segmentation and Radiogenomic Survival Prediction
This work addresses survival prediction for brain cancer patients by combining imaging and genomic data, representing an incremental advance in medical AI.
The paper tackled improving Glioblastoma Multiforme prognosis by integrating gene expression data with radiomic features from MRI, using a novel FCN architecture for missing modality generation and segmentation, resulting in boosted overall survival estimation through fused radiogenomic features.
The accurate prognosis of Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM) plays an essential role in planning correlated surgeries and treatments. The conventional models of survival prediction rely on radiomic features using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In this paper, we propose a radiogenomic overall survival (OS) prediction approach by incorporating gene expression data with radiomic features such as shape, geometry, and clinical information. We exploit TCGA (The Cancer Genomic Atlas) dataset and synthesize the missing MRI modalities using a fully convolutional network (FCN) in a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN). Meanwhile, the same FCN architecture enables the tumor segmentation from the available and the synthesized MRI modalities. The proposed FCN architecture comprises octave convolution (OctConv) and a novel decoder, with skip connections in spatial and channel squeeze & excitation (skip-scSE) block. The OctConv can process low and high-frequency features individually and improve model efficiency by reducing channel-wise redundancy. Skip-scSE applies spatial and channel-wise excitation to signify the essential features and reduces the sparsity in deeper layers learning parameters using skip connections. The proposed approaches are evaluated by comparative experiments with state-of-the-art models in synthesis, segmentation, and overall survival (OS) prediction. We observe that adding missing MRI modality improves the segmentation prediction, and expression levels of gene markers have a high contribution in the GBM prognosis prediction, and fused radiogenomic features boost the OS estimation.