Radiomics for Preoperative Assessment of Pituitary Adenoma Consistency with T2-Weighted MRI: A Multicenter Study

Introduction
Pituitary adenoma (PA) consistency significantly influences the outcomes of endoscopic endonasal surgery. Radiomics represents a promising tool for objective and quantitative assessment using T2-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Methods
A multicenter retrospective database was collected (2012–2023), including 394 patients with preoperative T2-weighted MRI and histologically confirmed PAs after endoscopic endonasal surgical removal. Tumor segmentation was performed manually on coronal T2-weighted images using ITK-SNAP software. Radiomic features were extracted with Pyradiomics. A 60:40 dataset split was used to train an Extra Trees classifier, and recursive feature elimination was used to select features. Model performance was assessed using sensitivity, specificity, and the area under the curve of receiver operating characteristic (AUC-ROC) curve metrics.

Results
From 1,106 extracted radiomic features, 65 were identified as most predictive following variance and correlation filtering. The sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of the ET classifier were 74%, 74%, and 63% (±10%), respectively. The AUC-ROC curve was 0.59.

Conclusion
Despite its moderate accuracy and AUC-ROC curve, the ET model showed promising performance to predict preoperative PA consistency, underlying the power of radiomics-driven models in PA surgical planning.