A predictive clinical-radiomics nomogram for survival prediction of glioblastoma using MRI

Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common and aggressive primary brain tumor in adult patients with a median survival of around one year. Prediction of survival outcomes in GBM patients could represent a huge step in treatment personalization. The objective of this study was to develop machine learning (ML) algorithms for survival prediction of GBM patient. We identified a radiomic signature on a training-set composed of data from the 2019 BraTS challenge (210 patients) from MRI retrieved at diagnosis. Then, using this signature along with the age of the patients for training classification models, we obtained on test-sets AUCs of 0.85, 0.74 and 0.58 (0.92, 0.88 and 0.75 on the training-sets) for survival at 9-, 12-and 15-months, respectively. This signature was then validated on an independent cohort of 116 GBM patients with confirmed disease relapse for the prediction of patients surviving less or more than the median OS of 22 months. Our model insured an AUC of 0.71 (0.65 on train). The Kaplan–Meier method showed significant OS difference between groups (log-rank p = 0.05). These results suggest that radiomic signatures may improve survival outcome predictions in GBM thus creating a solid clinical tool for tailoring therapy in this population.