Radiomics model links brain MRI features with neuropsychological changes in Crohn's disease
Researchers have developed a radiomics model that could help characterize neural changes in patients with Crohn’s disease.
A new study published in Insights Into Imaging details the model’s development and subsequent performance in differentiating between healthy controls and individuals with CD using a combination of multiparametric brain MRI features and various clinical factors. Using the model, the team was able to home in on specific imaging features in the brain that could help to better elucidate the relationship between neural health and the gut microbiome, potentially paving the way for targeted therapies in patients with Crohn's, authors of the study suggested.
“The gut-brain axis serves as a crucial physiological connection between the central nervous system and gastrointestinal tract, and accumulating evidence indicates that it is involved in the pathogenesis, making it a promising target for managing CD. However, the neural alterations in CD patients remain unclear, impeding the development of corresponding treatment strategies,” Xue-hua Li, from the Department of Radiology at The First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-Sen University in China, and colleagues noted.
For the research, experts had 230 Crohn's patients and 46 healthy controls complete a series of diagnostic exams, including brain MRIs, psychological assessments, blood metabolic analyses and/or fecal 16S rRNA sequencing. The team developed the radiomics model by integrating 13 imaging features (listed in descending order of importance here) derived from a dataset of more than 13,000 to determine if it could differentiate between the healthy controls and patients with CD based on brain imaging alone. Additionally, multiomics data, which included gut microbiomics, blood metabolomics and brain radiomics, was used to compare and highlight differences between both sets of participants.
The radiomics model performed well in terms of distinguishing CD patients from healthy controls in the training set, achieving a 0.99 AUC. That performance carried over to the test set as well, with an AUC of 0.95. The team observed a significant relationship between CD-enriched blood metabolites such as triacylglycerol, brain imaging features and CD-enriched microbiota as well.
Eight of the imaging features used to develop the model have been previously utilized in other studies on CD, but the additional five had not been documented in Crohn’s patients prior to this study, the group noted. Those features—lower R2star values in the left hippocampus, higher KFA (from DKI) in the left caudal anterior cingulate cortex, increased geodesic anisotropy (GA; from DKI) in the right superior-frontal cortex and enhanced CBF in the left middle temporal cortex and left thalamus—could provide additional insights into the neuropsychological changes experienced by patients with the condition, the authors suggested.
“All these findings support the hypothesis that alterations in the gut microbiota and blood metabolites are associated with brain changes in CD patients through the gut-brain axis, thereby validating the alterations in brain MRI,” the group explained. “Clinical and preclinical studies have substantiated the efficacy of brain-gut axis-based emotional therapy in ameliorating intestinal lesions and clinical markers.”
Learn more about the research here.
In addition to her background in journalism, Hannah also has patient-facing experience in clinical settings, having spent more than 12 years working as a registered rad tech. She began covering the medical imaging industry for Innovate Healthcare in 2021.