Radiomics side experiments and DAFIT approach in identifying pulmonary hypertension using Cardiac MRI derived radiomics based machine learning models.

Side experiments are performed on radiomics models to improve their reproducibility. We measure the impact of myocardial masks, radiomic side experiments and data augmentation for information transfer (DAFIT) approach to differentiate patients with and without pulmonary hypertension (PH) using cardiac MRI (CMRI) derived radiomics. Feature extraction was performed from the left ventricle (LV) and right ventricle (RV) myocardial masks using CMRI in 82 patients (42 PH and 40 controls). Various side study experiments were evaluated: Original data without and with intraclass correlation (ICC) feature-filtering and DAFIT approach (without and with ICC feature-filtering). Multiple machine learning and feature selection strategies were evaluated. Primary analysis included all PH patients with subgroup analysis including PH patients with preserved LVEF (≥ 50%). For both primary and subgroup analysis, DAFIT approach without feature-filtering was the highest performer (AUC 0.957-0.958). ICC approaches showed poor performance compared to DAFIT approach. The performance of combined LV and RV masks was superior to individual masks alone. There was variation in top performing models across all approaches (AUC 0.862-0.958). DAFIT approach with features from combined LV and RV masks provide superior performance with poor performance of feature filtering approaches. Model performance varies based upon the feature selection and model combination.