Radiomic Machine Learning Classifiers in Spine Bone Tumors: A Multi-Software, Multi-Scanner Study

This report describes the process of radiomics, its challenges, and its potential power to facilitate better clinical decision making, particularly in the care of patients with cancer.

Radiomics aims to quantify phenotypic characteristics on medical imaging through the use of automated algorithms. Radiomic artificial intelligence (AI) technology, either based on engineered hard-coded algorithms or deep learning methods, can be used to develop non-invasive imaging-based biomarkers. However, lack of standardized algorithm definitions and image processing severely hampers reproducibility and comparability of results. To address this issue, we developed PyRadiomics , a flexible open-source platform capable of extracting a large panel of engineered features from medical images. PyRadiomics is implemented in Python and can be used standalone or using 3D-Slicer. Here, we discuss the workflow and architecture of PyRadiomics and demonstrate its application in characterizing lung-lesions. Source code, documentation, and examples are publicly available at www.radiomics.io . With this platform, we aim to establish a reference standard for radiomic analyses, provide a tested and maintained resource, and to grow the community of radiomic developers addressing critical needs in cancer research.

Active contour segmentation and its robust implementation using level set methods are well-established theoretical approaches that have been studied thoroughly in the image analysis literature. Despite the existence of these powerful segmentation methods, the needs of clinical research continue to be fulfilled, to a large extent, using slice-by-slice manual tracing. To bridge the gap between methodological advances and clinical routine, we developed an open source application called ITK-SNAP, which is intended to make level set segmentation easily accessible to a wide range of users, including those with little or no mathematical expertise. This paper describes the methods and software engineering philosophy behind this new tool and provides the results of validation experiments performed in the context of an ongoing child autism neuroimaging study. The validation establishes SNAP intrarater and interrater reliability and overlap error statistics for the caudate nucleus and finds that SNAP is a highly reliable and efficient alternative to manual tracing. Analogous results for lateral ventricle segmentation are provided.