Robustness of pulmonary nodule radiomic features on CT as a function of varying radiation dose levels

The aim of this study was to present an in vivo stability analysis of radiomic features for pulmonary nodules against varying radiation dose levels. The authors found that a large majority of pulmonary nodule radiomic features were not inherently robust to radiation dose level variations and determined that a lower radiation dose introduces increasingly random noise and bias to radiomic feature values of pulmonary nodules.

Key points

• The vast majority of commonly used radiomic features are strongly influenced by variations in radiation dose level.
• A small minority of radiomic features, notably the shape feature class, are robust against dose-level variations according to ICC calculations.
• A large subset of radiomic features can be corrected by a linear model taking into account only the radiation dose level.

Article: Robustness of pulmonary nodule radiomic features on computed tomography as a function of varying radiation dose levels—a multi-dose in vivo patient study

Authors: Gijs A. Bartholomeus, Wouter A. C. van Amsterdam, Annemarie M.den Harder, Martin J. Willemink, Robbert W. van Hamersvelt, Pim A. de Jong & Tim Leiner