Abstract
Multiple myeloma (MM) is the second most common hematologic malignancy (after non-Hodgkin lymphoma)
in the U.S. Over the past decade, despite the advent of novel therapies that has improved the life expectancy of
patients with MM, MM is still incurable. Patient outcome varies widely with overall survival (OS) ranging from
less than 1 year to greater than 10 years. The large variability of patient overall survival resulting from the high
heterogeneous microenvironment of MM heightens the needs of risk-adapted treatment for long-term control,
which are largely relied on accurate assessment of tumor evolution and survival prediction. The International
Myeloma Working Group (IMWG) guideline and several other different prognostic models have been used to
assess treatment outcomes. These systems utilize different subsets of laboratory values from clinic tests as
assessment criteria, which may not indicate the full extent of tumor burden. MRI is the gold standard imaging
modality for detection of bone marrow involvement. It provides global representation of the tumor burden, even
for patient with non-secretory or hypo-secretory MM. We hypothesize that integrating multimodal information
delivered by time serial noninvasive MR imaging and clinical tests will provide more robust and accurate
modeling of MM evolution during and after treatment, and thus can predict treatment outcomes more reliably at
an early time. Our goal is to develop a framework of decision support system (DSS) that integrates MR images
and clinical tests to assist physicians in making informed decisions on tailoring treatment for an individual MM
patient. The proposed study aims to (1) Investigate the effectiveness of MRI radiomic features in characterizing
MM infiltration and their correlations with treatment outcomes, (2) Investigate the circumstances how the
combination of MRI radiomics and clinical tests complements each other and is more powerful in early prediction
of treatment outcomes. To achieve these aims, we will retrospectively collect a large data set of MM cases with
baseline and follow-up MRI scans and clinical tests for development and validation of the DSS system. We will
utilize advanced artificial intelligence (AI) techniques including recurrent neural networks and reinforcement
learning to train predictive models with time serial MRI and clinical data acquired at multiple time points, which
allows the trained models to be deployed flexibly to each individual time point for treatment assessment to
facilitate early prediction. Furthermore, these advanced AI techniques can learn intertemporal dependencies
from available data to compensate for the missing data or exams at single time points in serial exams which may
occur in real-world clinical situation. With a flexible modular architecture design of our DSS system, we will
investigate the inter- and intra-relationships between MRI and laboratory variables for better understanding of
their complementarity in characterizing tumor burden during MM treatment and their association with treatment
outcomes. As a final step, using an independent multi-institutional test set, we will validate the performance of
the developed DSS in predicting the recurrence risk at an early time point during treatment.