Pretreatment Prediction of Adaptive Radiation Therapy Eligibility Using MRI-Based Radiomics for Advanced Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Patients

Artificial Intelligence-Driven Radiomics in Head and Neck Cancer: Current Status and Future Prospects

BACKGROUND

Radiomics is a rapidly growing field used to leverage medical radiological images by extracting quantitative features. These are supposed to characterize a patient's phenotype, and when combined with artificial intelligence techniques, to improve the accuracy of diagnostic models and clinical outcome prediction.

OBJECTIVES

This review aims at examining the application areas of artificial intelligence-based radiomics (AI-based radiomics) for the management of head and neck cancer (HNC). It further explores the workflow of AI-based radiomics for personalized and precision oncology in HNC. Finally, it examines the current challenges of AI-based radiomics in daily clinical oncology and offers possible solutions to these challenges.

METHODS

Comprehensive electronic databases (PubMed, Medline via Ovid, Scopus, Web of Science, CINAHL, and Cochrane Library) were searched following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines. The quality of included studies and their risk of biases were evaluated using the Transparent Reporting of a Multivariable Prediction Model for Individual Prognosis or Diagnosis (TRIPOD)and Prediction Model Risk of Bias Assessment Tool (PROBAST).

RESULTS

Out of the 659 search hits retrieved, 45 fulfilled the inclusion criteria. Our review revealed that the application of AI-based radiomics model as an ancillary tool for improved decision-making in HNC management includes radiomics-based cancer diagnosis and radiomics-based cancer prognosis. The radiomics-based cancer diagnosis includes tumor staging, tumor grading, and classification of malignant and benign tumors. Similarly, radiomics-based cancer prognosis includes prediction for treatment response, recurrence, metastasis, and survival. In addition, the challenges in the implementation of these models for clinical evaluations include data imbalance, feature engineering (extraction and selection), model generalizability, multi-modal fusion, and model interpretability.

CONCLUSION

Considering the highly subjective and interobserver variability that is peculiar to the interpretation of medical images by expert clinicians, AI-based radiomics seeks to offer potentially useful quantitative information, which is not visible to the human eye or unintentionally often remain ignored during clinical imaging practice. By enabling the extraction of this type of information, AI-based radiomics has the potential to revolutionize HNC oncology, providing a platform for more personalized, higher quality, and cost-effective care for HNC patients.

TransAnaNet: Transformer-based Anatomy Change Prediction Network for Head and Neck Cancer Patient Radiotherapy

Background

Adaptive radiotherapy (ART) can compensate for the dosimetric impact of anatomic change during radiotherapy of head neck cancer (HNC) patients. However, implementing ART universally poses challenges in clinical workflow and resource allocation, given the variability in patient response and the constraints of available resources. Therefore, early identification of head and neck cancer (HNC) patients who would experience significant anatomical change during radiotherapy (RT) is of importance to optimize patient clinical benefit and treatment resources.

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to assess the feasibility of using a vision-transformer (ViT) based neural network to predict radiotherapy induced anatomic change of HNC patients.

Methods

We retrospectively included 121 HNC patients treated with definitive RT/CRT. We collected the planning CT (pCT), planned dose, CBCTs acquired at the initial treatment (CBCT01) and fraction 21 (CBCT21), and primary tumor volume (GTVp) and involved nodal volume (GTVn) delineated on both pCT and CBCTs for model construction and evaluation. A UNet-style ViT network was designed to learn the spatial correspondence and contextual information from embedded image patches of CT, dose, CBCT01, GTVp, and GTVn. The deformation vector field between CBCT01 and CBCT21 was estimated by the model as the prediction of anatomic change, and deformed CBCT01 was used as the prediction of CBCT21. We also generated binary masks of GTVp, GTVn and patient body for volumetric change evaluation. We used data from 100 patients for training and validation, and the remaining 21 patients for testing. Image and volumetric similarity metrics including mean square error (MSE), structural similarity index (SSIM), dice coefficient, and average surface distance were used to measure the similarity between the target image and predicted CBCT.

Results

The predicted image from the proposed method yielded the best similarity to the real image (CBCT21) over pCT, CBCT01, and predicted CBCTs from other comparison models. The average MSE and SSIM between the normalized predicted CBCT to CBCT21 are 0.009 and 0.933, while the average dice coefficient between body mask, GTVp mask, and GTVn mask are 0.972, 0.792, and 0.821 respectively.

Conclusions

The proposed method showed promising performance for predicting radiotherapy induced anatomic change, which has the potential to assist in the decision making of HNC Adaptive RT.

Predicting the need for a replan in oropharyngeal cancer: A radiomic, clinical, and dosimetric model

BACKGROUND

Patients with oropharyngeal cancer (OPC) treated with chemoradiation can experience weight loss and tumor shrinkage, altering the prescribed treatment. Treatment replanning ensures patients do not receive excessive doses to normal tissue. However, it is a time- and resource-intensive process, as it takes 1 to 2 weeks to acquire a new treatment plan, and during this time, overtreatment of normal tissues could lead to increased toxicities. Currently, there are limited prognostic factors to determine which patients will require a replan. There remains an unmet need for predictive models to assist in identifying patients who could benefit from the knowledge of a replan prior to treatment.

PURPOSE

We aimed to develop and evaluate a CT-based radiomic model, integrating clinical and dosimetric information, to predict the need for a replan prior to treatment.

METHODS

A dataset of patients (n = 315) with OPC treated with chemoradiation was used for this study. The dataset was split into independent training (n = 220) and testing (n = 95) datasets. Tumor volumes and organs at risk (OARs) were contoured on planning CT images. PyRadiomics was used to compute radiomic image features (n = 1218) on the original and filtered images from each of the primary tumor, nodal volumes, and ipsilateral and contralateral parotid glands. Nine clinical features and nine dose features extracted from the OARs were collected and those significantly (p < 0.05) associated with the need for a replan in the training dataset were used in a baseline model. Random forest feature selection was applied to select the optimal radiomic features to predict replanning. Logistic regression, Naïve Bayes, support vector machine, and random forest classifiers were built using the non-correlated selected radiomic, clinical, and dose features on the training dataset and performance was assessed in the testing dataset. The area under the curve (AUC) was used to assess the prognostic value.

RESULTS

A total of 78 patients (25%) required a replan. Smoking status, nodal stage, base of tongue subsite, and larynx mean dose were found to be significantly associated with the need for a replan in the training dataset and incorporated into the baseline model, as well as into the combined models. Five predictive radiomic features were selected (one nodal volume, one primary tumor, two ipsilateral and one contralateral parotid gland). The baseline model comprised of clinical and dose features alone achieved an AUC of 0.66 [95% CI: 0.51-0.79] in the testing dataset. The random forest classifier was the top-performing radiomics model and achieved an AUC of 0.82 [0.75-0.89] in the training dataset and an AUC of 0.78 [0.68-0.87] in the testing dataset, which significantly outperformed the baseline model (p = 0.023, testing dataset).

CONCLUSIONS

This is the first study to use radiomics from the primary tumor, nodal volumes, and parotid glands for the prediction of replanning for patients with OPC. Radiomic features augmented clinical and dose features for predicting the need for a replan in our testing dataset. Once validated, this model has the potential to assist physicians in identifying patients that may benefit from a replan, allowing for better resource allocation and reduced toxicities.

Deciphering the Prognostic Efficacy of MRI Radiomics in Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma: A Comprehensive Meta-Analysis

This meta-analysis investigates the prognostic value of MRI-based radiomics in nasopharyngeal carcinoma treatment outcomes, specifically focusing on overall survival (OS) variability. The study protocol was registered with INPLASY (INPLASY202420101). Initially, a systematic review identified 15 relevant studies involving 6243 patients through a comprehensive search across PubMed, Embase, and Web of Science, adhering to PRISMA guidelines. The methodological quality was assessed using the Quality in Prognosis Studies (QUIPS) tool and the Radiomics Quality Score (RQS), highlighting a low risk of bias in most domains. Our analysis revealed a significant average concordance index (c-index) of 72% across studies, indicating the potential of radiomics in clinical prognostication. However, moderate heterogeneity was observed, particularly in OS predictions. Subgroup analyses and meta-regression identified validation methods and radiomics software as significant heterogeneity moderators. Notably, the number of features in the prognosis model correlated positively with its performance. These findings suggest radiomics' promising role in enhancing cancer treatment strategies, though the observed heterogeneity and potential biases call for cautious interpretation and standardization in future research.

Prospects for online adaptive radiation therapy (ART) for head and neck cancer

BACKGROUND

The aim of the present study is to examine the impact of kV-CBCT-based online adaptive radiation therapy (ART) on dosimetric parameters in comparison to image-guided-radiotherapy (IGRT) in consecutive patients with tumors in the head and neck region from a prospective registry.

METHODS

The study comprises all consecutive patients with tumors in the head and neck area who were treated with kV-CBCT-based online ART or IGRT-modus at the linear-accelerator ETHOS™. As a measure of effectiveness, the equivalent-uniform-dose was calculated for the CTV (EUDCTV) and organs-at-risk (EUDOAR) and normalized to the prescribed dose. As an important determinant for the need of ART the interfractional shifts of anatomic landmarks related to the tongue were analyzed and compared to the intrafractional shifts. The latter determine the performance of the adapted dose distribution on the verification CBCT2 postadaptation.

RESULTS

Altogether 59 consecutive patients with tumors in the head-and-neck-area were treated from 01.12.2021 to 31.01.2023. Ten of all 59 patients (10/59; 16.9%) received at least one phase within a treatment course with ART. Of 46 fractions in the adaptive mode, irradiation was conducted in 65.2% of fractions with the adaptive-plan, the scheduled-plan in the remaining. The dispersion of the distributions of EUDCTV-values from the 46 dose fractions differed significantly between the scheduled and adaptive plans (Ansari-Bradley-Test, p = 0.0158). Thus, the 2.5th percentile of the EUDCTV-values by the adaptive plans amounted 97.1% (95% CI 96.6-99.5%) and by the scheduled plans 78.1% (95% CI 61.8-88.7%). While the EUDCTV for the accumulated dose distributions stayed above 95% at PTV-margins of ≥ 3 mm for all 8 analyzed treatment phases the scheduled plans did for margins ≥ 5 mm. The intrafractional anatomic shifts of all 8 measured anatomic landmarks were smaller than the interfractional with overall median values of 8.5 mm and 5.5 mm (p < 0.0001 for five and p < 0.05 for all parameters, pairwise comparisons, signed-rank-test). The EUDOAR-values for the larynx and the parotid gland were significantly lower for the adaptive compared with the scheduled plans (Wilcoxon-test, p < 0.001).

CONCLUSIONS

The mobile tongue and tongue base showed considerable interfractional variations. While PTV-margins of 5 mm were sufficient for IGRT, ART showed the potential of decreasing PTV-margins and spare dose to the organs-at-risk.

Development of a prediction model for head and neck volume reduction by clinical factors, dose-volume histogram parameters and radiomics in head and neck cancer†

In external radiotherapy of head and neck (HN) cancers, the reduction of irradiation accuracy due to HN volume reduction often causes a problem. Adaptive radiotherapy (ART) can effectively solve this problem; however, its application to all cases is impractical because of cost and time. Therefore, finding priority cases is essential. This study aimed to predict patients with HN cancers are more likely to need ART based on a quantitative measure of large HN volume reduction and evaluate model accuracy. The study included 172 cases of patients with HN cancer who received external irradiation. The HN volume was calculated using cone-beam computed tomography (CT) for irradiation-guided radiotherapy for all treatment fractions and classified into two groups: cases with a large reduction in the HN volume and cases without a large reduction. Radiomic features were extracted from the primary gross tumor volume (GTV) and nodal GTV of the planning CT. To develop the prediction model, four feature selection methods and two machine-learning algorithms were tested. Predictive performance was evaluated by the area under the curve (AUC), accuracy, sensitivity and specificity. Predictive performance was the highest for the random forest, with an AUC of 0.662. Furthermore, its accuracy, sensitivity and specificity were 0.692, 0.700 and 0.813, respectively. Selected features included radiomic features of the primary GTV, human papillomavirus in oropharyngeal cancer and the implementation of chemotherapy; thus, these features might be related to HN volume change. Our model suggested the potential to predict ART requirements based on HN volume reduction .

An efficient strategy to select head and neck cancer patients for adaptive radiotherapy

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE

Adaptive radiotherapy (ART) is workload intensive but only benefits a subgroup of patients. We aimed to develop an efficient strategy to select candidates for ART in the first two weeks of head and neck cancer (HNC) radiotherapy.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

This study retrospectively enrolled 110 HNC patients who underwent modern photon radiotherapy with at least 5 weekly in-treatment re-scan CTs. A semi auto-segmentation method was applied to obtain the weekly mean dose (Dmean) to OARs. A comprehensive NTCP-profile was applied to obtain NTCP's. The difference between planning and actual values of Dmean (ΔDmean) and dichotomized difference of clinical relevance (BIOΔNTCP) were used for modelling to determine the cut-off maximum ΔDmean of OARs in week 1 and 2 (maxΔDmean_1 and maxΔDmean_2). Four strategies to select candidates for ART, using cut-off maxΔDmean were compared.

RESULTS

The Spearman's rank correlation test showed significant positive correlation between maxΔDmean and BIOΔNTCP (p-value <0.001). For major BIOΔNTCP (>5%) of acute and late toxicity, 10.9% and 4.5% of the patients were true candidates for ART. Strategy C using both cut-off maxΔDmean_1 (3.01 and 5.14 Gy) and cut-off maxΔDmean_2 (3.41 and 5.30 Gy) showed the best sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values (0.92, 0.82, 0.38, 0.99 for acute toxicity and 1.00, 0.92, 0.38, 1.00 for late toxicity, respectively).

CONCLUSIONS

We propose an efficient selection strategy for ART that is able to classify the subgroup of patients with >5% BIOΔNTCP for late toxicity using imaging in the first two treatment weeks.

Identification of reproducible radiomic features from on-board volumetric images: A multi-institutional phantom study

BACKGROUND

Radiomics analysis using on-board volumetric images has attracted research attention as a method for predicting prognosis during treatment; however, the lack of standardization is still one of the main concerns.

PURPOSE

This study investigated the factors that influence the reproducibility of radiomic features extracted from on-board volumetric images using an anthropomorphic radiomics phantom. Furthermore, a phantom experiment was conducted with different treatment machines from multiple institutions as external validation to identify reproducible radiomic features.

METHODS

The phantom was designed to be 35 × 20 × 20 cm with eight types of heterogeneous spheres (⌀ = 1, 2, and 3 cm). On-board volumetric images were acquired using 15 treatment machines from eight institutions. Of these, kilovoltage cone-beam computed tomography (kV-CBCT) image data acquired from four treatment machines at one institution were used as an internal evaluation dataset to explore the reproducibility of radiomic features. The remaining image data, including kV-CBCT, megavoltage-CBCT (MV-CBCT), and megavoltage computed tomography (MV-CT) provided by seven different institutions (11 treatment machines), were used as an external validation dataset. A total of 1,302 radiomic features, including 18 first-order, 75 texture, 465 (i.e., 93 × 5) Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG) filter-based, and 744 (i.e., 93 × 8) wavelet filter-based features, were extracted within the spheres. The intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) was calculated to explore feature repeatability and reproducibility using an internal evaluation dataset. Subsequently, the coefficient of variation (COV) was calculated to validate the feature variability of external institutions. An absolute ICC exceeding 0.85 or COV under 5% was considered indicative of a highly reproducible feature.

RESULTS

For internal evaluation, ICC analysis showed that the median percentage of radiomic features with high repeatability was 95.2%. The ICC analysis indicated that the median percentages of highly reproducible features for inter-tube current, reconstruction algorithm, and treatment machine were decreased by 20.8%, 29.2%, and 33.3%, respectively. For external validation, the COV analysis showed that the median percentage of reproducible features was 31.5%. A total of 16 features, including nine LoG filter-based and seven wavelet filter-based features, were indicated as highly reproducible features. The gray-level run-length matrix (GLRLM) was classified as containing the most frequent features (N = 8), followed by the gray-level dependence matrix (N = 7) and gray-level co-occurrence matrix (N = 1) features.

CONCLUSIONS

We developed the standard phantom for radiomics analysis of kV-CBCT, MV-CBCT, and MV-CT images. With this phantom, we revealed that the differences in the treatment machine and image reconstruction algorithm reduce the reproducibility of radiomic features from on-board volumetric images. Specifically, the most reproducible features for external validation were LoG or wavelet filter-based GLRLM features. However, the acceptability of the identified features should be examined in advance at each institution before applying the findings to prognosis prediction.

The Promise and Future of Radiomics for Personalized Radiotherapy Dosing and Adaptation

Quantitative image analysis, also known as radiomics, aims to analyze large-scale quantitative features extracted from acquired medical images using hand-crafted or machine-engineered feature extraction approaches. Radiomics has great potential for a variety of clinical applications in radiation oncology, an image-rich treatment modality that utilizes computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and positron emission tomography (PET) for treatment planning, dose calculation, and image guidance. A promising application of radiomics is in predicting treatment outcomes after radiotherapy such as local control and treatment-related toxicity using features extracted from pretreatment and on-treatment images. Based on these individualized predictions of treatment outcomes, radiotherapy dose can be sculpted to meet the specific needs and preferences of each patient. Radiomics can aid in tumor characterization for personalized targeting, especially for identifying high-risk regions within a tumor that cannot be easily discerned based on size or intensity alone. Radiomics-based treatment response prediction can aid in developing personalized fractionation and dose adjustments. In order to make radiomics models more applicable across different institutions with varying scanners and patient populations, further efforts are needed to harmonize and standardize the acquisition protocols by minimizing uncertainties within the imaging data.

Automated tracking of morphologic changes in weekly magnetic resonance imaging during head and neck radiotherapy

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE

Anatomic changes during head and neck radiotherapy can impact dose delivery, necessitate adaptive replanning, and indicate patient-specific response to treatment. We have developed an automated system to track these changes through longitudinal MRI scans to aid identification and clinical intervention. The purpose of this article is to describe this tracking system and present results from an initial cohort of patients.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

The Automated Watchdog in Adaptive Radiotherapy Environment (AWARE) was developed to process longitudinal MRI data for radiotherapy patients. AWARE automatically identifies and collects weekly scans, propagates radiotherapy planning structures, computes structure changes over time, and reports important trends to the clinical team. AWARE also incorporates manual structure review and revision from clinical experts and dynamically updates tracking statistics when necessary. AWARE was applied to patients receiving weekly T2-weighted MRI scans during head and neck radiotherapy. Changes in nodal gross tumor volume (GTV) and parotid gland delineations were tracked over time to assess changes during treatment and identify early indicators of treatment response.

RESULTS

N = 91 patients were tracked and analyzed in this study. Nodal GTVs and parotids both shrunk considerably throughout treatment (-9.7 ± 7.7% and -3.7 ± 3.3% per week, respectively). Ipsilateral parotids shrunk significantly faster than contralateral (-4.3 ± 3.1% vs. -2.9 ± 3.3% per week, p = 0.005) and increased in distance from GTVs over time (+2.7 ± 7.2% per week, p < 1 × 10^-5 ). Automatic structure propagations agreed well with manual revisions (Dice = 0.88 ± 0.09 for parotids and 0.80 ± 0.15 for GTVs), but for GTVs the agreement degraded 4-5 weeks after the start of treatment. Changes in GTV volume observed by AWARE as early as one week into treatment were predictive of large changes later in the course (AUC = 0.79).

CONCLUSION

AWARE automatically identified longitudinal changes in GTV and parotid volumes during radiotherapy. Results suggest that this system may be useful for identifying rapidly responding patients as early as one week into treatment.

Radiomic feature repeatability and its impact on prognostic model generalizability: A multi-institutional study on nasopharyngeal carcinoma patients

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE

To investigate the radiomic feature (RF) repeatability via perturbation and its impact on cross-institutional prognostic model generalizability in Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma (NPC) patients.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

286 and 183 NPC patients from two institutions were included for model training and validation. Perturbations with random translations and rotations were applied to contrast-enhanced T1-weighted (CET1-w) MR images. RFs were extracted from primary tumor volume under a wide range of image filtering and discretization settings. RF repeatability was assessed by intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), which was used to equally separate the RFs into low- and high-repeatable groups by the median value. After feature selection, multivariate Cox regression and Kaplan-Meier analysis were independently employed to develop and analyze prognostic models. Concordance index (C-index) and P-value from log-rank test were used to assess model performance.

RESULTS

Most textural RFs from high-pass wavelet-filtered images were susceptible to image perturbations. It was more prominent when a smaller discretization bin number was used (e.g., 8, mean ICC = 0.69). Using high-repeatable RFs for model development yielded a significantly higher C-index (0.63) in the validation cohort than when only low-repeatable RFs were used (0.57, P = 0.024), suggesting higher model generalizability. Besides, significant risk stratification in the validation cohort was observed only when high-repeatable RFs were used (P < 0.001).

CONCLUSION

Repeatability of RFs from high-pass wavelet-filtered CET1-w MR images of primary NPC tumor was poor, particularly when a smaller bin number was used. Exclusive use of high-repeatable RFs is suggested to safeguard model generalizability for wide-spreading clinical utilization.

Association of Multi-Phasic MR-Based Radiomic and Dosimetric Features with Treatment Response in Unresectable Hepatocellular Carcinoma Patients following Novel Sequential TACE-SBRT-Immunotherapy

This study aims to investigate the association of pre-treatment multi-phasic MR-based radiomics and dosimetric features with treatment response to a novel sequential trans-arterial chemoembolization (TACE) plus stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT) plus immunotherapy regimen in unresectable Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC) sub-population. Twenty-six patients with unresectable HCC were retrospectively analyzed. Radiomic features were extracted from 42 lesions on arterial phase (AP) and portal-venous phase (PVP) MR images. Delta-phase (DeltaP) radiomic features were calculated as AP-to-PVP ratio. Dosimetric data of the tumor was extracted from dose-volume-histograms. A two-sided independent Mann-Whitney U test was used to assess the clinical association of each feature, and the classification performance of each significant independent feature was assessed using logistic regression. For the 3-month timepoint, four DeltaP-derived radiomics that characterize the temporal change in intratumoral randomness and uniformity were the only contributors to the treatment response association (p-value = 0.038-0.063, AUC = 0.690-0.766). For the 6-month timepoint, DeltaP-derived radiomic features (n = 4) maintained strong clinical associations with the treatment response (p-value = 0.047-0.070, AUC = 0.699-0.788), additional AP-derived radiomic features (n = 4) that reflect baseline tumoral arterial-enhanced signal pattern and tumor morphology (n = 1) that denotes initial tumor burden were shown to have strong associations with treatment response (p-value = 0.028-0.074, AUC = 0.719-0.773). This pilot study successfully demonstrated associations of pre-treatment multi-phasic MR-based radiomics with tumor response to the novel treatment regimen.

Deep learning attention-guided radiomics for COVID-19 chest radiograph classification

Background

Accurate assessment of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) lung involvement through chest radiograph plays an important role in effective management of the infection. This study aims to develop a two-step feature merging method to integrate image features from deep learning and radiomics to differentiate COVID-19, non-COVID-19 pneumonia and normal chest radiographs (CXR).

Methods

In this study, a deformable convolutional neural network (deformable CNN) was developed and used as a feature extractor to obtain 1,024-dimensional deep learning latent representation (DLR) features. Then 1,069-dimensional radiomics features were extracted from the region of interest (ROI) guided by deformable CNN's attention. The two feature sets were concatenated to generate a merged feature set for classification. For comparative experiments, the same process has been applied to the DLR-only feature set for verifying the effectiveness of feature concatenation.

Results

Using the merged feature set resulted in an overall average accuracy of 91.0% for three-class classification, representing a statistically significant improvement of 0.6% compared to the DLR-only classification. The recall and precision of classification into the COVID-19 class were 0.926 and 0.976, respectively. The feature merging method was shown to significantly improve the classification performance as compared to using only deep learning features, regardless of choice of classifier (P value <0.0001). Three classes' F1-score were 0.892, 0.890, and 0.950 correspondingly (i.e., normal, non-COVID-19 pneumonia, COVID-19).

Conclusions

A two-step COVID-19 classification framework integrating information from both DLR and radiomics features (guided by deep learning attention mechanism) has been developed. The proposed feature merging method has been shown to improve the performance of chest radiograph classification as compared to the case of using only deep learning features.

Dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging-based radiomics for the prediction of progression-free survival in advanced nasopharyngeal carcinoma

To establish a multidimensional nomogram model for predicting progression-free survival (PFS) and risk stratification in patients with advanced nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). This retrospective cross-sectional study included 156 patients with advanced NPC who underwent dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI). Radiomic features were extracted from the efflux rate constant (Ktrans ) and extracellular extravascular volume (Ve ) mapping derived from DCE-MRI. Least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) Cox regression analysis was applied for feature selection. The Radscore was constructed using the selected features with their respective weights in the LASSO Cox regression analysis. A nomogram model combining the Radscore and clinical factors was built using multivariate Cox regression analysis. The C-index was used to assess the discrimination power of the Radscore and nomogram. The Kaplan-Meier method was used for survival analysis. Of the 360 radiomic features, 28 were selected (7, 6, and 15 features extracted from Ktrans , Ve, and Ktrans +Ve images, respectively). The combined Radscore k trans +Ve (C-index, 0.703, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.571-0.836) showed higher efficacy in predicting the prognosis of advanced NPC than Radscore k trans (C-index, 0.693; 95% CI, 0.560-0.826) and Radscore Ve (C-index, 0.614; 95% CI, 0.481-0.746) did. Multivariable Cox regression analysis revealed clinical stage, T stage, and treatment with nimotuzumab as risk factors for PFS. The nomogram established by Radscore k trans +Ve and risk factors (C-index, 0.732; 95% CI: 0.599-0.864) was better than Radscore k trans +Ve in predicting PFS in patients with advanced NPC. A lower Radscore k trans +Ve (HR 3.5584, 95% CI 2.1341-5.933), lower clinical stage (hazard ratio [HR] 1.5982, 95% CI 0.5262-4.854), lower T stage (HR 1.4365, 95% CI 0.6745-3.060), and nimotuzumab (NTZ) treatment (HR 0.7879, 95% CI 0.4899-1.267) were associated with longer PFS. Kaplan-Meier analysis showed a lower PFS in the high-risk group than in the low-risk group (p<0.0001). The nomogram based on combined pretreatment DCE-MRI radiomics features, NTZ, and clinicopathological risk factors may be considered as a noninvasive imaging marker for predicting individual PFS in patients with advanced NPC.

A diagnosis model in nasopharyngeal carcinoma based on PET/MRI radiomics and semiquantitative parameters

BACKGROUND

The staging of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is of great value in treatment and prognosis. We explored whether a positron emission tomography/ magnetic resonance imaging (PET/MRI) based comprehensive model of radiomics features and semiquantitative parameters was useful for clinical evaluation of NPC staging.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

A total of 100 NPC patients diagnosed with non-keratinized undifferentiated carcinoma were divided into early-stage group (I-II) and advanced-stage group (III-IV) and divided into the training set (n = 70) and the testing set (n = 30). Radiomics features (n = 396 × 2) of the primary site of NPC were extracted from MRI and PET images, respectively. Three major semiquantitative parameters of primary sites including maximum standardized uptake value (SUVmax), metabolic tumor volume (MTV), and total lesion glycolysis (TLG) in all NPC patients were measured. After feature selection, three diagnostic models including the radiomics model, the metabolic parameter model, and the combined model were established using logistic regression model. Finally, internal validation was performed, and a nomogram for NPC comprehensive diagnosis has been made.

RESULTS

The radiomics model and metabolic parameter model showed an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.83 and 0.80 in the testing set, respectively. The combined model based on radiomics and semiquantitative parameters showed an AUC of 0.90 in the testing set, with the best performance among the three models.

CONCLUSION

The combined model based on PET/MRI radiomics and semiquantitative parameters is of great value in the evaluation of clinical stage (early-stage group and advanced-stage group) of NPC.

Early Prediction of Planning Adaptation Requirement Indication Due to Volumetric Alterations in Head and Neck Cancer Radiotherapy: A Machine Learning Approach

Background: During RT cycles, the tumor response pattern could affect tumor coverage and may lead to organs at risk of overdose. As such, early prediction of significant volumetric changes could therefore reduce potential radiation-related adverse effects. Nevertheless, effective machine learning approaches based on the radiomic features of the clinically used CBCT images to determine the tumor volume variations due to RT not having been implemented so far. Methods: CBCT images from 40 HN cancer patients were collected weekly during RT treatment. From the obtained images, the Clinical Target Volume (CTV) and Parotid Glands (PG) regions of interest were utilized to calculate 104 delta-radiomics features. These features were fed on a feature selection and classification procedure for the early prediction of significant volumetric alterations. Results: The proposed framework was able to achieve 0.90 classification performance accuracy while detecting a small subset of discriminative characteristics from the 1st week of RT. The selected features were further analyzed regarding their effects on temporal changes in anatomy and tumor response modeling. Conclusion: The use of machine learning algorithms offers promising perspectives for fast and reliable early prediction of large volumetric deviations as a result of RT treatment, exploiting hidden patterns in the overall anatomical characteristics.

Radiomics-guided radiation therapy: opportunities and challenges

Radiomics is an advanced image-processing framework, which extracts image features and considers them as biomarkers towards personalized medicine. Applications include disease detection, diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy response assessment/prediction. As radiation therapy aims for further individualized treatments, radiomics could play a critical role in various steps before, during and after treatment. Elucidation of the concept of radiomics-guided radiation therapy (RGRT) is the aim of this review, attempting to highlight opportunities and challenges underlying the use of radiomics to guide clinicians and physicists towards more effective radiation treatments. This work identifies the value of RGRT in various steps of radiotherapy from patient selection to follow-up, and subsequently provides recommendations to improve future radiotherapy using quantitative imaging features.

A deep learning-based radiomics approach to predict head and neck tumor regression for adaptive radiotherapy

Early regression—the regression in tumor volume during the initial phase of radiotherapy (approximately 2 weeks after treatment initiation)—is a common occurrence during radiotherapy. This rapid radiation-induced tumor regression may alter target coordinates, necessitating adaptive radiotherapy (ART). We developed a deep learning-based radiomics (DLR) approach to predict early head and neck tumor regression and thereby facilitate ART. Primary gross tumor volume (GTVp) was monitored in 96 patients and nodal GTV (GTVn) in 79 patients during treatment. All patients underwent two computed tomography (CT) scans: one before the start of radiotherapy for initial planning and one during radiotherapy for boost planning. Patients were assigned to regression and nonregression groups according to their median tumor regression rate (ΔGTV/treatment day from initial to boost CT scan). We input a GTV image into the convolutional neural network model, which was pretrained using natural image datasets, via transfer learning. The deep features were extracted from the last fully connected layer. To clarify the prognostic power of the deep features, machine learning models were trained. The models then predicted the regression and nonregression of GTVp and GTVn and evaluated the predictive performance by 0.632 + bootstrap area under the curve (AUC). Predictive performance for GTVp regression was highest using the InceptionResNetv2 model (mean AUC = 0.75) and that for GTVn was highest using NASNetLarge (mean AUC = 0.73). Both models outperformed the handcrafted radiomics features (mean AUC = 0.63 for GTVp and 0.61 for GTVn) or clinical factors (0.64 and 0.67, respectively). DLR may facilitate ART for improved radiation side-effects and target coverage.

Prediction of Response to Induction Chemotherapy Plus Concurrent Chemoradiotherapy for Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Based on MRI Radiomics and Delta Radiomics: A Two-Center Retrospective Study

Objective

We aimed to establish an MRI radiomics model and a Delta radiomics model to predict tumor retraction after induction chemotherapy (IC) combined with concurrent chemoradiotherapy (CCRT) for primary nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) in non-endemic areas and to validate its efficacy.

Methods

A total of 272 patients (155 in the training set, 66 in the internal validation set, and 51 in the external validation set) with biopsy pathologically confirmed primary NPC who were screened for pretreatment MRI were retrospectively collected. The NPC tumor was delineated as a region of interest in the two sequenced images of MRI before treatment and after IC, followed by radiomics feature extraction. With the use of maximum relevance minimum redundancy (mRMR) and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) algorithms, logistic regression was performed to establish pretreatment MRI radiomics and pre- and post-IC Delta radiomics models. The optimal Youden’s index was taken; the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, calibration curve, and decision curve were drawn to evaluate the predictive efficacy of different models.

Results

Seven optimal feature subsets were selected from the pretreatment MRI radiomics model, and twelve optimal subsets were selected from the Delta radiomics model. The area under the ROC curve, accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, negative predictive value (NPV), and positive predictive value (PPV) of the MRI radiomics model were 0.865, 0.827, 0.837, 0.813, 0.776, and 0.865, respectively; the corresponding indicators of the Delta radiomics model were 0.941, 0.883, 0.793, 0.968, 0.833, and 0.958, respectively.

Conclusion

The pretreatment MRI radiomics model and pre- and post-IC Delta radiomics models could predict the IC-CCRT response of NPC in non-epidemic areas.

MR-Guided Adaptive Radiotherapy for OAR Sparing in Head and Neck Cancers

Simple Summary

Normal tissue toxicities in head and neck cancer persist as a cause of decreased quality of life and are associated with poorer treatment outcomes. The aim of this article is to review organ at risk (OAR) sparing approaches available in MR-guided adaptive radiotherapy and present future developments which hope to improve treatment outcomes. Increasing the spatial conformity of dose distributions in radiotherapy is an important first step in reducing normal tissue toxicities, and MR-guided treatment devices presents a new opportunity to use biological information to drive treatment decisions on a personalized basis.

Abstract

MR-linac devices offer the potential for advancements in radiotherapy (RT) treatment of head and neck cancer (HNC) by using daily MR imaging performed at the time and setup of treatment delivery. This article aims to present a review of current adaptive RT (ART) methods on MR-Linac devices directed towards the sparing of organs at risk (OAR) and a view of future adaptive techniques seeking to improve the therapeutic ratio. This ratio expresses the relationship between the probability of tumor control and the probability of normal tissue damage and is thus an important conceptual metric of success in the sparing of OARs. Increasing spatial conformity of dose distributions to target volume and OARs is an initial step in achieving therapeutic improvements, followed by the use of imaging and clinical biomarkers to inform the clinical decision-making process in an ART paradigm. Pre-clinical and clinical findings support the incorporation of biomarkers into ART protocols and investment into further research to explore imaging biomarkers by taking advantage of the daily MR imaging workflow. A coherent understanding of this road map for RT in HNC is critical for directing future research efforts related to sparing OARs using image-guided radiotherapy (IGRT).

Integration of MRI-Based Radiomics Features, Clinicopathological Characteristics, and Blood Parameters: A Nomogram Model for Predicting Clinical Outcome in Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma

Purpose

This study aimed to develop a nomogram model based on multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) radiomics features, clinicopathological characteristics, and blood parameters to predict the progression-free survival (PFS) of patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC).

Methods

A total of 462 patients with pathologically confirmed nonkeratinizing NPC treated at Sichuan Cancer Hospital were recruited from 2015 to 2019 and divided into training and validation cohorts at a ratio of 7:3. The least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) algorithm was used for radiomics feature dimension reduction and screening in the training cohort. Rad-score, age, sex, smoking and drinking habits, Ki-67, monocytes, monocyte ratio, and mean corpuscular volume were incorporated into a multivariate Cox proportional risk regression model to build a multifactorial nomogram. The concordance index (C-index) and decision curve analysis (DCA) were applied to estimate its efficacy.

Results

Nine significant features associated with PFS were selected by LASSO and used to calculate the rad-score of each patient. The rad-score was verified as an independent prognostic factor for PFS in NPC. The survival analysis showed that those with lower rad-scores had longer PFS in both cohorts (p < 0.05). Compared with the tumor–node–metastasis staging system, the multifactorial nomogram had higher C-indexes (training cohorts: 0.819 vs. 0.610; validation cohorts: 0.820 vs. 0.602). Moreover, the DCA curve showed that this model could better predict progression within 50% threshold probability.

Conclusion

A nomogram that combined MRI-based radiomics with clinicopathological characteristics and blood parameters improved the ability to predict progression in patients with NPC.

Radiomics in Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is one of the most common head and neck malignancies, and the primary treatment methods are radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Radiotherapy alone, concurrent chemoradiotherapy, and induction chemotherapy combined with concurrent chemoradiotherapy can be used according to different grades. Treatment options and prognoses vary greatly depending on the grade of disease in the patients. Accurate grading and risk assessment are required. Recently, radiomics has combined a large amount of invisible high-dimensional information extracted from computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, or positron emission tomography with powerful computing capabilities of machine-learning algorithms, providing the possibility to achieve an accurate diagnosis and individualized treatment for cancer patients. As an effective tumor biomarker of NPC, the radiomic signature has been widely used in grading, differential diagnosis, prediction of prognosis, evaluation of treatment response, and early identification of therapeutic complications. The process of radiomic research includes image segmentation, feature extraction, feature selection, model establishment, and evaluation. Many open-source or commercial tools can be used to achieve these procedures. The development of machine-learning algorithms provides more possibilities for radiomics research. This review aimed to summarize the application of radiomics in NPC and introduce the basic process of radiomics research.

Multi-Organ Omics-Based Prediction for Adaptive Radiation Therapy Eligibility in Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Patients Undergoing Concurrent Chemoradiotherapy

Purpose

To investigate the role of different multi-organ omics-based prediction models for pre-treatment prediction of Adaptive Radiotherapy (ART) eligibility in patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC).

Methods and Materials

Pre-treatment contrast-enhanced computed tomographic and magnetic resonance images, radiotherapy dose and contour data of 135 NPC patients treated at Hong Kong Queen Elizabeth Hospital were retrospectively analyzed for extraction of multi-omics features, namely Radiomics (R), Morphology (M), Dosiomics (D), and Contouromics (C), from a total of eight organ structures. During model development, patient cohort was divided into a training set and a hold-out test set in a ratio of 7 to 3 via 20 iterations. Four single-omics models (R, M, D, C) and four multi-omics models (RD, RC, RM, RMDC) were developed on the training data using Ridge and Multi-Kernel Learning (MKL) algorithm, respectively, under 10-fold cross validation, and evaluated on hold-out test data using average area under the receiver-operator-characteristics curve (AUC). The best-performing single-omics model was first determined by comparing the AUC distribution across the 20 iterations among the four single-omics models using two-sided student t-test, which was then retrained using MKL algorithm for a fair comparison with the four multi-omics models.

Results

The R model significantly outperformed all other three single-omics models (all p-value<0.0001), achieving an average AUC of 0.942 (95%CI: 0.938-0.946) and 0.918 (95%CI: 0.903-0.933) in training and hold-out test set, respectively. When trained with MKL, the R model (R_MKL) yielded an increased AUC of 0.984 (95%CI: 0.981-0.988) and 0.927 (95%CI: 0.905-0.948) in training and hold-out test set respectively, while demonstrating no significant difference as compared to all studied multi-omics models in the hold-out test sets. Intriguingly, Radiomic features accounted for the majority of the final selected features, ranging from 64% to 94%, in all the studied multi-omics models.

Conclusions

Among all the studied models, the Radiomic model was found to play a dominant role for ART eligibility in NPC patients, and Radiomic features accounted for the largest proportion of features in all the multi-omics models.

A Multi-Center Study of CT-Based Neck Nodal Radiomics for Predicting an Adaptive Radiotherapy Trigger of Ill-Fitted Thermoplastic Masks in Patients with Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma

Significant lymph node shrinkage is common in patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) throughout radiotherapy (RT) treatment, causing ill-fitted thermoplastic masks (IfTMs). To deal with this, an ad hoc adaptive radiotherapy (ART) may be required to ensure accurate and safe radiation delivery and to maintain treatment efficacy. Presently, the entire procedure for evaluating an eligible ART candidate is time-consuming, resource-demanding, and highly inefficient. In the artificial intelligence paradigm, the pre-treatment identification of NPC patients at risk for IfTMs has become greatly demanding for achieving efficient ART eligibility screening, while no relevant studies have been reported. Hence, we aimed to investigate the capability of computed tomography (CT)-based neck nodal radiomics for predicting IfTM-triggered ART events in NPC patients via a multi-center setting. Contrast-enhanced CT and the clinical data of 124 and 58 NPC patients from Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) and Queen Mary Hospital (QMH), respectively, were retrospectively analyzed. Radiomic (R), clinical (C), and combined (RC) models were developed using the ridge algorithm in the QEH cohort and evaluated in the QMH cohort using the median area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUC). Delong’s test was employed for model comparison. Model performance was further assessed on 1000 replicates in both cohorts separately via bootstrapping. The R model yielded the highest “corrected” AUC of 0.784 (BCa 95%CI: 0.673–0.859) and 0.723 (BCa 95%CI: 0.534–0.859) in the QEH and QMH cohort following bootstrapping, respectively. Delong’s test indicated that the R model performed significantly better than the C model in the QMH cohort (p < 0.0001), while demonstrating no significant difference compared to the RC model (p = 0.5773). To conclude, CT-based neck nodal radiomics was capable of predicting IfTM-triggered ART events in NPC patients in this multi-center study, outperforming the traditional clinical model. The findings of this study provide valuable insights for future study into developing an effective screening strategy for ART eligibility in NPC patients in the long run, ultimately alleviating the workload of clinical practitioners, streamlining ART procedural efficiency in clinics, and achieving personalized RT for NPC patients in the future.

Radiomics for Diagnosis and Radiotherapy of Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is a malignant tumor of the head and neck. The primary clinical manifestations are nasal congestion, blood-stained nasal discharge, headache, and hearing loss. It occurs frequently in Southeast Asia, North Africa, and especially in southern China. Radiotherapy is the main treatment, and currently, imaging examinations used for the diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of NPC include computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET)-CT, and PET-MRI. These methods play an important role in target delineation, radiotherapy planning design, dose evaluation, and outcome prediction. However, the anatomical and metabolic information obtained at the macro level of images may not meet the increasing accuracy required for radiotherapy. As a technology used for mining deep image information, radiomics can provide further information for the diagnosis and treatment of NPC and promote individualized precision radiotherapy in the future. This paper reviews the application of radiomics in the diagnosis and treatment of nasopharyngeal carcinoma.

Building Radiomics Models Based on Triple-Phase CT Images Combining Clinical Features for Discriminating the Risk Rating in Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumors

We aimed to build radiomics models based on triple-phase CT images combining clinical features to predict the risk rating of gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GISTs). A total of 231 patients with pathologically diagnosed GISTs from July 2012 to July 2020 were categorized into a training data set (82 patients with high risk, 80 patients with low risk) and a validation data set (35 patients with high risk, 34 patients with low risk) with a ratio of 7:3. Four diagnostic models were constructed by assessing 20 clinical characteristics and 18 radiomic features that were extracted from a lesion mask based on triple-phase CT images. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were applied to calculate the diagnostic performance of these models, and ROC curves of these models were compared using Delong test in different data sets. The results of ROC analyses showed that areas under ROC curves (AUC) of model 4 [Clinic + CT value of unenhanced (CTU) + CT value of arterial phase (CTA) + value of venous phase (CTV)], model 1 (Clinic + CTU), model 2 (Clinic + CTA), and model 3 (Clinic + CTV) were 0.925, 0.894, 0.909, and 0.914 in the training set and 0.897, 0.866, 0,892, and 0.892 in the validation set, respectively. Model 4, model 1, model 2, and model 3 yielded an accuracy of 88.3%, 85.8%, 86.4%, and 84.6%, a sensitivity of 85.4%, 84.2%, 76.8%, and 78.0%, and a specificity of 91.2%, 87.5%, 96.2%, and 91.2% in the training set and an accuracy of 88.4%, 84.1%, 82.6%, and 82.6%, a sensitivity of 88.6%, 77.1%, 74.3%, and 85.7%, and a specificity of 88.2%, 91.2%, 91.2%, and 79.4% in the validation set, respectively. There was a significant difference between model 4 and model 1 in discriminating the risk rating in gastrointestinal stromal tumors in the training data set (Delong test, p < 0.05). The radiomic models based on clinical features and triple-phase CT images manifested excellent accuracy for the discrimination of risk rating of GISTs.

Diagnostic Performance of 2D and 3D T2WI-Based Radiomics Features With Machine Learning Algorithms to Distinguish Solid Solitary Pulmonary Lesion

Objective

To evaluate the performance of 2D and 3D radiomics features with different machine learning approaches to classify SPLs based on magnetic resonance(MR) T2 weighted imaging (T2WI).

Material and Methods

A total of 132 patients with pathologically confirmed SPLs were examined and randomly divided into training (n = 92) and test datasets (n = 40). A total of 1692 3D and 1231 2D radiomics features per patient were extracted. Both radiomics features and clinical data were evaluated. A total of 1260 classification models, comprising 3 normalization methods, 2 dimension reduction algorithms, 3 feature selection methods, and 10 classifiers with 7 different feature numbers (confined to 3–9), were compared. The ten-fold cross-validation on the training dataset was applied to choose the candidate final model. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), precision-recall plot, and Matthews Correlation Coefficient were used to evaluate the performance of machine learning approaches.

Results

The 3D features were significantly superior to 2D features, showing much more machine learning combinations with AUC greater than 0.7 in both validation and test groups (129 vs. 11). The feature selection method Analysis of Variance(ANOVA), Recursive Feature Elimination(RFE) and the classifier Logistic Regression(LR), Linear Discriminant Analysis(LDA), Support Vector Machine(SVM), Gaussian Process(GP) had relatively better performance. The best performance of 3D radiomics features in the test dataset (AUC = 0.824, AUC-PR = 0.927, MCC = 0.514) was higher than that of 2D features (AUC = 0.740, AUC-PR = 0.846, MCC = 0.404). The joint 3D and 2D features (AUC=0.813, AUC-PR = 0.926, MCC = 0.563) showed similar results as 3D features. Incorporating clinical features with 3D and 2D radiomics features slightly improved the AUC to 0.836 (AUC-PR = 0.918, MCC = 0.620) and 0.780 (AUC-PR = 0.900, MCC = 0.574), respectively.

Conclusions

After algorithm optimization, 2D feature-based radiomics models yield favorable results in differentiating malignant and benign SPLs, but 3D features are still preferred because of the availability of more machine learning algorithmic combinations with better performance. Feature selection methods ANOVA and RFE, and classifier LR, LDA, SVM and GP are more likely to demonstrate better diagnostic performance for 3D features in the current study.

Machine Learning for Head and Neck Cancer: A Safe Bet?-A Clinically Oriented Systematic Review for the Radiation Oncologist

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE

Machine learning (ML) is emerging as a feasible approach to optimize patients' care path in Radiation Oncology. Applications include autosegmentation, treatment planning optimization, and prediction of oncological and toxicity outcomes. The purpose of this clinically oriented systematic review is to illustrate the potential and limitations of the most commonly used ML models in solving everyday clinical issues in head and neck cancer (HNC) radiotherapy (RT).

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Electronic databases were screened up to May 2021. Studies dealing with ML and radiomics were considered eligible. The quality of the included studies was rated by an adapted version of the qualitative checklist originally developed by Luo et al. All statistical analyses were performed using R version 3.6.1.

RESULTS

Forty-eight studies (21 on autosegmentation, four on treatment planning, 12 on oncological outcome prediction, 10 on toxicity prediction, and one on determinants of postoperative RT) were included in the analysis. The most common imaging modality was computed tomography (CT) (40%) followed by magnetic resonance (MR) (10%). Quantitative image features were considered in nine studies (19%). No significant differences were identified in global and methodological scores when works were stratified per their task (i.e., autosegmentation).

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

The range of possible applications of ML in the field of HN Radiation Oncology is wide, albeit this area of research is relatively young. Overall, if not safe yet, ML is most probably a bet worth making.

Machine learning for dose-volume histogram based clinical decision-making support system in radiation therapy plans for brain tumors

•

Extraction, analysis, and interpretation of historical treatment planning data is valuable but very time-consuming.

•

Proposed machine learning model classifies radiotherapy plans based on their treatment planning objectives and trade-offs.

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Application of double nested cross-validation enabled to build a robust model that achieved 94% accuracy on a testing data.

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Model reasoning investigated with SHAP values showed consistency with clinical observations.

Purpose

To create and investigate a novel, clinical decision-support system using machine learning (ML).

Methods and Materials

The ML model was developed based on 79 radiotherapy plans of brain tumor patients that were prescribed a total dose of 60 Gy delivered with volumetric-modulated arc therapy (VMAT). Structures considered for analysis included planning target volume (PTV), brainstem, cochleae, and optic chiasm. The model aimed to classify the target variable that included class-0 corresponding to plans for which the PTV treatment planning objective was met and class-1 that was associated with plans for which the PTV objective was not met due to the priority trade-off to meet one or more organs-at-risk constraints. Several models were evaluated using double-nested cross-validation and an area-under-the-curve (AUC) metric, with the highest performing one selected for further investigation. The model predictions were explained with Shapely additive explanation (SHAP) interaction values.

Results

The highest-performing model was Logistic Regression achieving an accuracy of 93.8 ± 4.1% and AUC of 0.98 ± 0.02 on the testing data. The SHAP analysis indicated that the ΔD_99% metric for PTV had the greatest influence on the model predictions. The least important feature was ΔD_MAX for the left and right cochleae.

Conclusions

The trained model achieved satisfactory accuracy and can be used by medical physicists in a data-driven quality assurance program as well as by radiation oncologists to support their decision-making process in terms of treatment plan approval and potential plan modifications. Model explanation analysis showed that the model relies on clinically valid logic when making predictions.

Residual Volume of Lymph Nodes During Chemoradiotherapy Based Nomogram to Predict Survival of Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Patient Receiving Induction Chemotherapy

Purpose

To accurately stratify nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) patients who were benefit from induction chemotherapy (IC) followed by chemoradiotherapy (CCRT), we established residual volume of lymph nodes during chemoradiotherapy based nomogram to predict survival for NPC patients.

Methods

Cox regression analysis were used to evaluate predictive effects of tumor volume parameters. Multivariate Cox regression analysis was used to identify the prognostic factors, and nomogram models were developed to predict survival of NPC patients receiving IC followed by CCRT.

Results

Compared with other tumor volumetric parameters, midRT GTVnd was the best predictive factor for OS (HR: 1.043, 95%CI: 1.031-1.055), PFS (HR: 1.040, 95%CI: 1.030- 1.051), and DMFS (HR: 1.046, 95%CI: 1.034 – 1.059) according to the HR of Cox regression analysis. Based on multivariate analysis, three nomograms included midRT GTVnd were constructed to predict 4-year survival. The C-index of nomograms for each survival endpoints were as follow (training cohort vs. validation cohort): 0.746 vs. 0.731 for OS; 0.747 vs. 0.735 for PFS; 0.768 vs. 0.729 for DMFS, respectively. AUC showed a good discriminative ability. Calibration curves demonstrated a consistence between actual results and predictions. Decision curve analysis (DCA) showed that the nomograms had better clinical predictive effects than current TNM staging system.

Conclusion

We identified the best volumetric indicator associated with prognosis was the residual volume of lymph nodes at the fourth week of chemoradiotherapy for patients receiving IC followed by CCRT. We developed and validated three nomograms to predict specific probability of 4-year OS, PFS and DMFS for NPC patient receiving IC followed by CCRT.

Radiomics in Head and Neck Cancers Radiotherapy. Promises and Challenges

Radiomics, a subdomain of artificial intelligence, consists in extracting a large volume of data from all medical imaging techniques and correlating them with clinical data in order to build predictive and prognostic models. Radiomics is related to radiogenomics that correlates genetic mutations and molecular and biological characteristics of tissues with information extracted from medical imaging. Both are state-of-the-art fields of translational biomedical research. The ability to predict early patient survival and response to treatment, but also the capacity to identify tumor subtypes non-invasively, could make radiomics a key player with an essential role in personalized oncology. In head and neck cancer radiotherapy, radiomic algorithms can predict not only the response to radiochemotherapy or induction chemotherapy but also the need for planning through adaptive radiotherapy (ART). Radiomics can also predict the risk of severe toxicities, especially that of xerostomia. Given the benefit that a de-escalation of treatment can bring in selected cases to improve the quality of life, radiomics is expected to be part of the therapeutic decision for head and neck cancers in the near future, and may help identify cases where de-escalation of multimodal therapy will not jeopardize the therapeutic benefit.

A Comprehensive Review on Radiomics and Deep Learning for Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Imaging

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is one of the most common malignant tumours of the head and neck, and improving the efficiency of its diagnosis and treatment strategies is an important goal. With the development of the combination of artificial intelligence (AI) technology and medical imaging in recent years, an increasing number of studies have been conducted on image analysis of NPC using AI tools, especially radiomics and artificial neural network methods. In this review, we present a comprehensive overview of NPC imaging research based on radiomics and deep learning. These studies depict a promising prospect for the diagnosis and treatment of NPC. The deficiencies of the current studies and the potential of radiomics and deep learning for NPC imaging are discussed. We conclude that future research should establish a large-scale labelled dataset of NPC images and that studies focused on screening for NPC using AI are necessary.

MRI based radiomics in nasopharyngeal cancer: Systematic review and perspectives using radiomic quality score (RQS) assessment

BACKGROUND

MRI based radiomics has the potential to better define tumor biology compared to qualitative MRI assessment and support decisions in patients affected by nasopharyngeal carcinoma. Aim of this review was to systematically evaluate the methodological quality of studies using MRI- radiomics for nasopharyngeal cancer patient evaluation.

METHODS

A systematic search was performed in PUBMED, WEB OF SCIENCE and SCOPUS using "MRI, magnetic resonance imaging, radiomic, texture analysis, nasopharyngeal carcinoma, nasopharyngeal cancer" in all possible combinations. The methodological quality of study included ( = 24) was evaluated according to the RQS (Radiomic quality score). Subgroup, for journal type (imaging/clinical) and biomarker (prognostic/predictive), and correlation, between RQS and journal Impact Factor, analyses were performed. Mann-Whitney U test and Spearman's correlation were performed. P value < .05 were defined as statistically significant.

RESULTS

Overall, no studies reported a phantom study or a test re-test for assessing stability in image, biological correlation or open science data. Only 8% of them included external validation. Almost half of articles (45 %) performed multivariable analysis with non-radiomics features. Only 1 study was prospective (4%). The mean RQS was 7.5 ± 5.4. No significant differences were detected between articles published in clinical/imaging journal and between studies with a predictive or prognostic biomarker. No significant correlation was found between total RQS and Impact Factor of the year of publication (p always > 0.05).

CONCLUSIONS

Radiomic articles in nasopharyngeal cancer are mostly of low methodological quality. The greatest limitations are the lack of external validation, biological correlates, prospective design and open science.

Radiomics in radiation oncology for gynecological malignancies: a review of literature

Radiomics is the extraction of a significant number of quantitative imaging features with the aim of detecting information in correlation with useful clinical outcomes. Features are extracted, after delineation of an area of interest, from a single or a combined set of imaging modalities (including X-ray, US, CT, PET/CT and MRI). Given the high dimensionality, the analytical process requires the use of artificial intelligence algorithms. Firstly developed for diagnostic performance in radiology, it has now been translated to radiation oncology mainly to predict tumor response and patient outcome but other applications have been developed such as dose painting, prediction of side-effects, and quality assurance. In gynecological cancers, most studies have focused on outcomes of cervical cancers after chemoradiation. This review highlights the role of this new tool for the radiation oncologists with particular focus on female GU oncology.

MRI-based radiomics as response predictor to radiochemotherapy for metastatic cervical lymph node in nasopharyngeal carcinoma

OBJECTIVE

To establish and substantiate MRI-based radiomic models to predict the treatment response of metastatic cervical lymph node to radiochemotherapy in patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC).

METHODS

A total of 145 consecutive patients with NPC were enrolled including 102 in primary cohort and 43 in validation cohort. Metastatic lymph nodes were diagnosed according to radiologic criteria and treatment response was evaluated according to the Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumors. A total of 2704 radiomic features were extracted from contrast-enhanced T₁ weighted imaging (CE- T₁WI) and T₂ weighted imaging (T₂WI) for each patient, and were selected to construct radiomic signatures for CE-T₁WI, T₂WI, and combined CE-T₁WI and T₂WI, respectively. The area under curve (AUC) of receiver operating characteristic, sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy were used to estimate the performance of these radiomic models in predicting treatment response of metastatic lymph node.

RESULTS

No significant difference of AUC was found among radiomic signatures of CE-T₁WI, T₂WI, and combined CE-T₁WI and T₂WI in the primary and validation cohorts (all p > 0.05). For combined CE-T₁WI and T₂WI data set, 12 features were selected to develop the radiomic signature. The AUC, sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy were 0.927 (0.878-0.975), 0.911 (0.804-0.970), 0.826 (0.686-0.922), and 0.872 (0.792-0.930) in primary cohort, and were 0.772 (0.624-0.920), 0.792 (0.578-0.929), 0.790 (0.544-0.939), and 0.791 (0.640-0.900) in validation cohort.

CONCLUSION

MRI-based radiomic models were developed to predict the treatment response of metastatic cervical lymph nodes to radiochemotherapy in patients with NPC, which might facilitate individualized therapy for metastatic lymph nodes before treatment.

ADVANCES IN KNOWLEDGE

Predicting the response in patients with NPC before treatment may allow more individualizing therapeutic strategy and avoid unnecessary side-effects and costs. Radiomic features extracted from metastatic cervical lymph nodes showed promising application for predicting the treatment response in NPC.

Application of radiomics and machine learning in head and neck cancers

With the continuous development of medical image informatics technology, more and more high-throughput quantitative data could be extracted from digital medical images, which has resulted in a new kind of omics-Radiomics. In recent years, in addition to genomics, proteomics and metabolomics, radiomic has attracted the interest of more and more researchers. Compared to other omics, radiomics can be perfectly integrated with clinical data, even with the pathology and molecular biomarker, so that the study can be closer to the clinical reality and more revealing of the tumor development. Mass data will also be generated in this process. Machine learning, due to its own characteristics, has a unique advantage in processing massive radiomic data. By analyzing mass amounts of data with strong clinical relevance, people can construct models that more accurately reflect tumor development and progression, thereby providing the possibility of personalized and sequential treatment of patients. As one of the cancer types whose treatment and diagnosis rely on imaging examination, radiomics has a very broad application prospect in head and neck cancers (HNC). Until now, there have been some notable results in HNC. In this review, we will introduce the concepts and workflow of radiomics and machine learning and their current applications in head and neck cancers, as well as the directions and applications of artificial intelligence in the treatment and diagnosis of HNC.

The Pivotal Role of the Therapeutic Radiographer/Radiation Therapist in Image-guided Radiotherapy Research and Development

The ability to personalise radiotherapy to fit the individual patient and their diagnosis has been realised through technological advancements. There is now more opportunity to utilise these technologies and deliver precision radiotherapy for more patients. Image-guided radiotherapy (IGRT) has enabled users to safely and accurately plan, treat and verify complex cases; and deliver a high dose to the target volume, while minimising dose to normal tissue. Rapid changes in IGRT have required a multidisciplinary team (MDT) approach, carefully deciding optimum protocols to achieve clinical benefit. Therapeutic radiographer/radiation therapists (RTTs) play a pivotal role in this MDT. There is already a great deal of evidence that illustrates the contribution of RTTs in IGRT development; implementation; quality assurance; and maintaining training and competency programmes. Often this has required the RTT to undertake additional roles and responsibilities. These publications show how the profession has evolved, expanding the scope of practice. There are now more opportunities for RTT-led IGRT research. This is not only undertaken in the more traditional aspects of practice, but in recent times, more RTTs are becoming involved in imaging biomarkers research and radiomic analysis. The aim of this overview is to describe the RTT contribution to the ongoing development of IGRT and to showcase some of the profession's involvement in IGRT research.

Reinventing radiation therapy with machine learning and imaging bio-markers (radiomics): State-of-the-art, challenges and perspectives

Radiation therapy is a pivotal cancer treatment that has significantly progressed over the last decade due to numerous technological breakthroughs. Imaging is now playing a critical role on deployment of the clinical workflow, both for treatment planning and treatment delivery. Machine-learning analysis of predefined features extracted from medical images, i.e. radiomics, has emerged as a promising clinical tool for a wide range of clinical problems addressing drug development, clinical diagnosis, treatment selection and implementation as well as prognosis. Radiomics denotes a paradigm shift redefining medical images as a quantitative asset for data-driven precision medicine. The adoption of machine-learning in a clinical setting and in particular of radiomics features requires the selection of robust, representative and clinically interpretable biomarkers that are properly evaluated on a representative clinical data set. To be clinically relevant, radiomics must not only improve patients' management with great accuracy but also be reproducible and generalizable. Hence, this review explores the existing literature and exposes its potential technical caveats, such as the lack of quality control, standardization, sufficient sample size, type of data collection, and external validation. Based upon the analysis of 165 original research studies based on PET, CT-scan, and MRI, this review provides an overview of new concepts, and hypotheses generating findings that should be validated. In particular, it describes evolving research trends to enhance several clinical tasks such as prognostication, treatment planning, response assessment, prediction of recurrence/relapse, and prediction of toxicity. Perspectives regarding the implementation of an AI-based radiotherapy workflow are presented.