Robustness of PET Radiomics Features: Impact of Co-Registration with MRI

Radiomics holds great promise in the field of cancer management. However, the clinical application of radiomics has been hampered by uncertainty about the robustness of the features extracted from the images. Previous studies have reported that radiomics features are sensitive to changes in voxel si...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Stefano, Alessandro, Leal Plaza, Antonio, Richiusa, Selene, Trang, Phan, Comelli, Albert, Benfante, Viviana
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2021
País:España
Institución:Universidad de Sevilla (US)
Repositorio:idUS. Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla
OAI Identifier:oai:idus.us.es:11441/139267
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/11441/139267
https://doi.org/10.3390/app112110170
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Radiomics feature robustness
Imaging quantification
[11C]-methionine positron emission tomography
PET/MRI co-registration
Descripción
Sumario:Radiomics holds great promise in the field of cancer management. However, the clinical application of radiomics has been hampered by uncertainty about the robustness of the features extracted from the images. Previous studies have reported that radiomics features are sensitive to changes in voxel size resampling and interpolation, image perturbation, or slice thickness. This study aims to observe the variability of positron emission tomography (PET) radiomics features under the impact of co-registration with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) using the difference percentage coefficient, and the Spearman’s correlation coefficient for three groups of images: (i) original PET, (ii) PET after co-registration with T1-weighted MRI and (iii) PET after co-registration with FLAIR MRI. Specifically, seventeen patients with brain cancers undergoing [11C]-Methionine PET were considered. Successively, PET images were co-registered with MRI sequences and 107 features were extracted for each mentioned group of images. The variability analysis revealed that shape features, first-order features and two subgroups of higher-order features possessed a good robustness, unlike the remaining groups of features, which showed large differences in the difference percentage coefficient. Furthermore, using the Spearman’s correlation coefficient, approximately 40% of the selected features differed from the three mentioned groups of images. This is an important consideration for users conducting radiomics studies with image co-registration constraints to avoid errors in cancer diagnosis, prognosis, and clinical outcome prediction.