T 2 -Weighted MR Imaging-Derived Radiomics for Pretreatment Determination of Therapeutic Response to Glucocorticoid in Patients With Thyroid-Associated Ophthalmopathy: Comparison With Semiquantitative Evaluation

MR imaging has been applied to determine therapeutic response to glucocorticoid (GC) before treatment in thyroid-associated ophthalmopathy (TAO), while the performance was still poor. To investigate the value of T -weighted imaging (T WI)-derived radiomics for pretreatment determination of therapeutic response to GC in TAO patients, and compare its diagnostic performance with that of semiquantitative parameters. Retrospective. A total of 110 patients (49 ± 12 years; male/female, n = 48/62; responsive/unresponsive, n = 62/48), divided into training (n = 78) and validation (n = 32) cohorts. 3.0 T, T -weighted fast spin echo. W.C. and H.H. (6 and 10 years of experience, respectively) performed the measurements. Maximum, mean, and minimum signal intensity ratios (SIRs) of extraocular muscle (EOM) bellies were collected to construct a semiquantitative imaging model. Radiomics features from volumes of interest covering EOM bellies were extracted and three machine learning-based (logistic regression [LR]; decision tree [DT]; support vector machine [SVM]) models were built. The diagnostic performances of models were evaluated using receiver operating characteristic curve analyses, and compared using DeLong test. Two-sided P