Purpose To evaluate repeatability of prostate DWI-derived radiomics and machine learning methods for prostate cancer (PCa) characterization.

Methods A total of 112 patients with diagnosed PCa underwent 2 prostate MRI examinations (Scan1 and Scan2) performed on the same day. DWI was performed using 12 b-values (0-2000 s/mm(2)), post-processed using kurtosis function, and PCa areas were annotated using whole mount prostatectomy sections. A total of 1694 radiomic features including Sobel, Kirch, Gradient, Zernike Moments, Gabor, Haralick, CoLIAGe, Haar wavelet coefficients, 3D analogue to Laws features, 2D contours, and corner detectors were calculated. Radiomics and 4 feature pruning methods (area under the receiver operator characteristic curve, maximum relevance minimum redundancy, Spearman's rho, Wilcoxon rank-sum) were evaluated in terms of Scan1-Scan2 repeatability using intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC)(3,1). Classification performance for clinically significant and insignificant PCa with Gleason grade groups 1 versus >1 was evaluated by area under the receiver operator characteristic curve in unseen random 30% data split.

Results The ICC(3,1) values for conventional radiomics and feature pruning methods were in the range of 0.28-0.90. The machine learning classifications varied between Scan1 and Scan2 with % of same class labels between Scan1 and Scan2 in the range of 61-81%. Surface-to-volume ratio and corner detector-based features were among the most represented features with high repeatability, ICC(3,1) >0.75, consistently high ranking using all 4 feature pruning methods, and classification performance with area under the receiver operator characteristic curve >0.70.

Conclusion Surface-to-volume ratio and corner detectors for prostate DWI led to good classification of unseen data and performed similarly in Scan1 and Scan2 in contrast to multiple conventional radiomic features.