Abstract
Abstract
Purpose
To evaluate the reproducibility of radiomics features derived via different pre-processing settings from paired T2-weighted imaging (T2WI) prostate lesions acquired within a short interval, to select the setting that yields the highest number of reproducible features, and to evaluate the impact of disease characteristics (i.e., clinical variables) on features reproducibility.
Materials and methods
A dataset of 50 patients imaged using T2WI at 2 consecutive examinations was used. The dataset was pre-processed using 48 different settings. A total of 107 radiomics features were extracted from manual delineations of 74 lesions. The inter-scan reproducibility of each feature was measured using the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC), with ICC values > 0.75 considered good. Statistical differences were assessed using Mann–Whitney U and Kruskal–Wallis tests.
Results
The pre-processing parameters strongly influenced the reproducibility of radiomics features of T2WI prostate lesions. The setting that yielded the highest number of features (25 features) with high reproducibility was the relative discretization with a fixed bin number of 64, no signal intensity normalization, and outlier filtering by excluding outliers. Disease characteristics did not significantly impact the reproducibility of radiomics features.
Conclusion
The reproducibility of T2WI radiomics features was significantly influenced by pre-processing parameters, but not by disease characteristics. The selected pre-processing setting yielded 25 reproducible features.
Funder
Norges Forskningsråd
The Norwegian Cancer Society and Prostatakreftforeningen
The Liaison Committee between the Central Norway Regional Health Authority and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology
NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Subject
Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and imaging,Radiological and Ultrasound Technology,Biophysics