Erschienen in:
08.03.2018 | Molecular Imaging
Robustness versus disease differentiation when varying parameter settings in radiomics features: application to nasopharyngeal PET/CT
verfasst von:
Wenbing Lv, Qingyu Yuan, Quanshi Wang, Jianhua Ma, Jun Jiang, Wei Yang, Qianjin Feng, Wufan Chen, Arman Rahmim, Lijun Lu
Erschienen in:
European Radiology
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Ausgabe 8/2018
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Abstract
Objectives
To investigate the impact of parameter settings as used for the generation of radiomics features on their robustness and disease differentiation (nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) versus chronic nasopharyngitis (CN) in FDG PET/CT imaging).
Methods
We studied 106 patients (69/37 NPC/CN, pathology confirmed), and extracted 57 radiomics features under different parameter settings. Robustness was assessed by the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC). Logistic regression with leave-one-out cross validation was used to generate classification probabilities, and diagnostic performance was assessed by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC).
Results
Varying averaging strategies and symmetry, 4/26 GLCM features showed poor range of pairwise ICCs of 0.02–0.98, while depicting good AUCs of 0.82–0.91. Varying distances, 5/26 GLCM features showed ICCs of 0.82–0.99 while corresponding AUCs were 0.52–0.91. 6/13 GLRLM features showed both high AUC (0.81–0.89) and high ICC (0.85–0.99) regarding to averaging strategies. 7/13 GLSZM features showed AUCs of 0.81–0.90 while having ICCs of 0.01–0.99 under different neighbourhoods. 2/5 NGTDM features showed AUCs of 0.81–0.85 while having ICCs of 0.19–0.89 for different window sizes. Differentiating a subset of NPC (stages I–II) form CN, both SumEntropy and SZLGE achieved significantly higher AUCs than metabolically active tumour volume (AUC: 0.91 vs. 0.72, p<0.01).
Conclusions
Radiomics features depicting poor absolute-scale robustness regarding to parameter settings can still lead to good diagnostic performance. As such, robustness of radiomics features should not be overemphasized for removal of features towards assessment of clinical tasks. For differentiating NPC from CN, some radiomics features (e.g. SumEntropy, SZLGE, LGZE) outperformed conventional metrics.
Key Points
• Poor robustness did not necessarily translate into poor differentiation performance.
• Absolute-scale robustness of radiomics features should not be overemphasized.
• Radiomics features SumEntropy, SZLGE and LGZE outperformed conventional metrics.