Robustness of radiomics features on 0.35 T magnetic resonance imaging for magnetic resonance-guided radiotherapy

Abstract

Background and purpose

MR-guided radiotherapy adds the precision of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to the therapeutic benefits of a linear accelerator. Prior to each therapeutic session, an MRI generates a significant volume of imaging data ripe for analysis. Radiomics stands at the forefront of medical imaging and oncology research, dedicated to mining quantitative imaging attributes to forge predictive models. However, the robustness of these models is often challenged.

Materials and methods

To assess the robustness of feature extraction, we conducted reproducibility studies using a 0.35 T MR-linac system, employing both a specialized phantom and patient-derived images, focusing on cases of pancreatic cancer. We extracted shape-based, first-order and textural features from patient-derived images and only first-order and textural features from phantom-derived images. The impact of the delay between simulation and first fraction images was also assessed with an equivalence test.

Results

From 107 features evaluated, 58 (54 %) were considered as non-reproducible: 18 were uniformly inconsistent across both phantom and patient images, 9 were specific to phantom-based analysis, and 31 to patient-derived data.

Conclusion

Our findings show that a significant proportion of radiomic features extracted from this dual dataset were unreliable. It is essential to discard these non-reproducible elements to refine and enhance radiomic model development, particularly for MR-guided radiotherapy in pancreatic cancer.