Yang Qiu

Objectives: This study aimed to develop and validate a biparametric MRI (bpMRI)-based radiomics model for the noninvasive prediction of tumor–stroma ratio (TSR) in prostate cancer (PCa). Additionally, we sought to explore lesion distribution patterns in the peripheral zone (PZ) and transition zone (TZ) to provide deeper insights into the biological behavior of PCa. Methods: This multicenter retrospective study included 223 pathologically confirmed PCa patients, with 146 for training and 39 for internal validation at Center 1, and 38 for external testing at Center 2. All patients underwent preoperative bpMRI (T2WI, DWI acquired with a b-value of 1400 s/mm², and ADC maps), with TSR histopathologically quantified. Regions of interest (ROIs) were manually segmented on bpMRI images using ITK-SNAP software (version 4.0.1), followed by high-throughput radiomic feature extraction. Redundant features were eliminated via Spearman correlation analysis and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression. Five machine learning (ML) classifiers—Logistic Regression (LR), Support Vector Machine (SVM), BernoulliNBBayes, Ridge, and Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD)—were trained and optimized. Model performance was rigorously evaluated using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and decision curve analysis (DCA). Results: The Ridge demonstrated superior diagnostic performance, achieving AUCs of 0.846, 0.789, and 0.745 in the training, validation, and test cohorts, respectively. Lesion distribution analysis revealed no significant differences between High-TSR and Low-TSR groups (p = 0.867), suggesting that TSR may not be strongly associated with zonal localization. Conclusions: This exploratory study suggests that a bpMRI-based radiomic model holds promise for noninvasive TSR estimation in prostate cancer and may provide complementary insights into tumor aggressiveness beyond conventional pathology.