Multi-objective Bayesian optimization with enhanced features for adaptively improved glioblastoma partitioning and survival prediction

Glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumor prevalent in adults, exhibits heterogeneity in its microstructures and vascular patterns. The delineation of its subregions could facilitate the development of region-targeted therapies. However, current unsupervised learning techniques for this task face challenges in reliability due to fluctuations of clustering algorithms, particularly when processing data from diverse patient cohorts. Furthermore, stable clustering results do not guarantee clinical meaningfulness. To establish the clinical relevance of these subregions, we will perform survival predictions using radiomic features extracted from them. Following this, achieving a balance between outcome stability and clinical relevance presents a significant challenge, further exacerbated by the extensive time required for hyper-parameter tuning.

In this study, we introduce a multi-objective Bayesian optimization (MOBO) framework, which leverages a Feature-enhanced Auto-Encoder (FAE) and customized losses to assess both the reproducibility of clustering algorithms and the clinical relevance of their outcomes. Specifically, we embed the entirety of these processes within the MOBO framework, modeling both using distinct Gaussian Processes (GPs). The proposed MOBO framework can automatically balance the trade-off between the two criteria by employing bespoke stability and clinical significance losses. Our approach efficiently optimizes all hyper-parameters, including the FAE architecture and clustering parameters, within a few steps. This not only accelerates the process but also consistently yields robust MRI subregion delineations and provides survival predictions with strong statistical validation.