The Multi-View Paradigm Shift in MRI Radiomics: Predicting MGMT Methylation in Glioblastoma

TL;DR

This paper presents a multi-view variational autoencoder framework that effectively integrates multimodal MRI radiomic features to predict MGMT methylation in glioblastoma, outperforming traditional methods.

Contribution

The study introduces a novel multi-view VAE approach for radiomics that preserves modality-specific information and improves MGMT methylation prediction accuracy.

Findings

Multi-view VAE achieves AUC of 0.77, outperforming baseline models.

The approach effectively integrates T1Gd and FLAIR MRI features.

Probabilistic encoding enhances predictive performance for MGMT status.

Abstract

Non-invasive inference of molecular tumor characteristics from medical imaging is a central goal of radiogenomics, particularly in glioblastoma (GBM), where O6-methylguanine-DNA methyltransferase (MGMT) promoter methylation carries important prognostic and therapeutic significance. Although radiomics-based machine learning methods have shown promise for this task, conventional unimodal and early-fusion approaches are often limited by high feature redundancy and incomplete modeling of modality-specific information. In this work, we introduce a multi-view latent representation learning framework based on variational autoencoders (VAE) that preserves modality-specific radiomic structure while enabling late fusion in a compact probabilistic latent space. The approach is evaluated on radiomic features extracted from the necrotic tumor core in post-contrast T1-weighted (T1Gd) and Fluid-Attenuated Inversion Re-covery (FLAIR) Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed multi-view VAE combined with a random forest classifier achieves a test Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) Curve (AUC) of 0.77 (95% confidence interval: 0.71-0.83), substantially outperforming both a baseline radiomics model (AUC = 0.54) and a hyperparameter-tuned model (AUC = 0.64). These findings indicate that multi-view probabilistic encoding enables more effective integration of complementary MRI information and significantly improves predictive performance for MGMT promoter methylation status.