Radiomics features analysis of PET images in oropharyngeal and hypopharyngeal cancer

This study used radiomics image analysis to examine the differences of texture feature values extracted from oropharyngeal and hypopharyngeal cancer positron emission tomography (PET) images on various tumor segmentations, and finds the proper and stable feature groups. A total of 80 oropharyngeal and hypopharyngeal cancer cases were retrospectively recruited. Radiomics method was applied to the PET image for the 80 oropharyngeal and hypopharyngeal cancer cases to extract texture features from various defined metabolic volumes. Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance method was used to test whether feature value difference exists between groups, which were grouped by stage, response to treatment, and recurrence. If there was a significant difference, the corresponding feature cutoff value was applied to the Kaplan–Meier estimator to estimate the survival functions. For the various defined metabolic volumes, there were 16 features that had significant differences between early (T1, T2) and late tumor stages (T3, T4). Five images and 2 textural features were found to be able to predict the tumor response and recurrence, respectively, with the areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves reaching 0.7. The histogram entropy was found to be a good predictor of overall survival (OS) and primary relapse-free survival (PRFS) of oropharyngeal and hypopharyngeal cancer patients. Textural features from PET images provide predictive and prognostic information in tumor staging, tumor response, recurrence, and have the potential to be a prognosticator for OS and PRFS in oropharyngeal and hypopharyngeal cancer.