Explainable Radiomics-Based Model for Automatic Image Quality Assessment in Breast Cancer DCE MRI Data

This study aims to develop an explainable radiomics-based model for the automatic assessment of image quality in breast cancer Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DCE-MRI) data. A cohort of 280 images obtained from a public database was annotated by two clinical experts, resulting in 110 high-quality and 110 low-quality images. The proposed methodology involved the extraction of 819 radiomic features and 2 No-Reference image quality metrics per patient, using both the whole image and the background as regions of interest. Feature extraction was performed under two scenarios: (i) from a sample of 12 slices per patient, and (ii) from the middle slice of each patient. Following model training, a range of machine learning classifiers were applied with explainability assessed through SHapley Additive Explanations (SHAP). The best performance was achieved in the second scenario, where combining features from the whole image and background with a support vector machine classifier yielded sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and AUC values of 85.51%, 80.01%, 82.76%, and 89.37%, respectively. This proposed model demonstrates potential for integration into clinical practice and may also serve as a valuable resource for large-scale repositories and subgroup analyses aimed at ensuring fairness and explainability.