Prediction of Human Papillomavirus (HPV) Association of Oropharyngeal Cancer (OPC) Using Radiomics: The Impact of the Variation of CT Scanner

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Recent studies exploring the application of radiomics features in medicine have shown promising results. However, variation in imaging parameters may impact the robustness of these features. Feature robustness may then in turn affect the prediction performance of the machine learning models built upon these features. While numerous studies have tested feature robustness against a variety of imaging parameters, the extent to which feature robustness affects predictions remains unclear. A particularly notable application of radiomics in clinical oncology is the prediction of Human Papillomavirus (HPV) association in Oropharyngeal cancer. In this study we explore how CT scanner type affects the performance of radiomics features for HPV association prediction and highlight the need to implement precautionary approaches so as to minimize this effect. ABSTRACT: Studies have shown that radiomic features are sensitive to the variability of imaging parameters (e.g., scanner models), and one of the major challenges in these studies lies in improving the robustness of quantitative features against the variations in imaging datasets from multi-center studies. Here, we assess the impact of scanner choice on computed tomography (CT)-derived radiomic features to predict the association of oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma with human papillomavirus (HPV). This experiment was performed on CT image datasets acquired from two different scanner manufacturers. We demonstrate strong scanner dependency by developing a machine learning model to classify HPV status from radiological images. These experiments reveal the effect of scanner manufacturer on the robustness of radiomic features, and the extent of this dependency is reflected in the performance of HPV prediction models. The results of this study highlight the importance of implementing an appropriate approach to reducing the impact of imaging parameters on radiomic features and consequently on the machine learning models, without removing features which are deemed non-robust but may contain learning information.