Assessment of variabilities in lung-contouring methods on CBCT preclinical radiomics outputs

Kathryn H. Brown*, Jacob Illyuk, Mihaela Ghita*, Gerard M. Walls*, Conor K. McGarry*, Karl T. Butterworth*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)
104 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Radiomics image analysis has the potential to uncover disease characteristics for the development of predictive signatures and personalised radiotherapy treatment. Inter-observer and inter-software delineation variabilities are known to have downstream effects on radiomics features, reducing the reliability of the analysis. The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of these variabilities on radiomics outputs from preclinical cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) scans. Inter-observer variabilities were assessed using manual and semi-automated contours of mouse lungs (n = 16). Inter-software variabilities were determined between two tools (3D Slicer and ITK-SNAP). The contours were compared using Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) scores and the 95th percentile of the Hausdorff distance (HD95p) metrics. The good reliability of the radiomics outputs was defined using intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) and their 95% confidence intervals. The median DSC scores were high (0.82–0.94), and the HD95p metrics were within the submillimetre range for all comparisons. the shape and NGTDM features were impacted the most. Manual contours had the most reliable features (73%), followed by semi-automated (66%) and inter-software (51%) variabilities. From a total of 842 features, 314 robust features overlapped across all contouring methodologies. In addition, our results have a 70% overlap with features identified from clinical inter-observer studies

Original languageEnglish
Article number2677
Number of pages12
JournalCancers
Volume15
Issue number10
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 09 May 2023

Keywords

  • 3D Slicer
  • inter-observer
  • ITK-SNAP
  • lung
  • preclinical analysis
  • radiomics
  • segmentation
  • Inter-observer
  • Segmentation
  • Lung
  • Radiomics
  • Preclinical Analysis
  • Itk-snap

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Oncology
  • Cancer Research

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