Purpose: Radiomic features extracted from medical images acquired in different countries may demonstrate a batch effect. Thus, we investigated the effect of harmonization on a database of radiomic features extracted from dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance (DCE-MR) breast imaging studies of 3150 benign lesions and cancers collected from international datasets, as well as the potential of harmonization to improve classification of malignancy.

Approach: Eligible features were harmonized by category using the ComBat method. Harmonization effect on features was evaluated using the Davies–Bouldin index for degree of clustering between populations for both benign lesions and cancers. Performance in distinguishing between cancers and benign lesions was evaluated for each dataset using 10-fold cross validation with the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) determined on the pre- and postharmonization sets of radiomic features in each dataset and a combined one. Differences in AUCs were evaluated for statistical significance.

Results: The Davies–Bouldin index increased by 27% for benign lesions and by 43% for cancers, indicating that the postharmonization features were more similar. Classification performance using postharmonization features performed better than that using preharmonization features (p  <  0.001 for all three).

Conclusion: Harmonization of radiomic features may enable combining databases from different populations for more comprehensive computer-aided diagnosis models of breast cancer.