Radiomic Analysis of Myocardial Native T1 Imaging Discriminates Between Hypertensive Heart Disease and Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy

This study sought to examine the diagnostic ability of radiomic texture analysis (TA) on quantitative cardiovascular magnetic resonance images to differentiate between hypertensive heart disease (HHD) and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). HHD and HCM are associated with increased left ventricular wall thickness (LVWT). Contemporary guidelines define HCM as LVWT ≥15 mm that is unexplained by other disease, which complicates diagnosis in cases of co-occurrences. Conventional global native T1 mapping involves calculation of mean T1 values as a surrogate for fibrosis. However, there may be differences in its spatial localization, such as diffuse and more focal fibrosis in HHD and HCM, respectively. This study identified 232 subjects (53 with HHD, 108 with HCM, and 71 control subjects) for TA who consecutively underwent free-breathing multislice native T1 mapping. Four sets of texture descriptors were applied to capture spatially dependent and independent pixel statistics. Six texture features were sequentially selected with the best discriminatory capacity between HHD and HCM and were tested using a support vector machine (SVM) classifier. Each disease group was randomly split 4:1 (feature selection/test validation), in which the reproducibility of the pattern was analyzed in the test validation dataset. The selected texture features provided the maximum diagnostic accuracy of 86.2% (c-statistic: 0.820; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.769 to 0.903) using the SVM. For the test validation dataset, the accuracy of the pattern remained high at 80.0% (c-statistic: 0.89; 95% CI: 0.77 to 1.00). Global native T1, with an accuracy of 64%, separated HHD and HCM patients modestly (c-statistic: 0.549; 95% CI: 0.452 to 0.640). Radiomics analysis of native T1 images discriminates between HHD and HCM patients and provides incremental value over global native T1 mapping. [Display omitted]