Biological dosiomic features for the prediction of radiation pneumonitis in esophageal cancer patients

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to develop a model using dose volume histogram (DVH) and dosiomic features to predict the risk of radiation pneumonitis (RP) in the treatment of esophageal cancer with radiation therapy and to compare the performance of DVH and dosiomic features after adjustment for the effect of fractionation by correcting the dose to the equivalent dose in 2 Gy (EQD2). MATERIALS AND METHODS: DVH features and dosiomic features were extracted from the 3D dose distribution of 101 esophageal cancer patients. The features were extracted with and without correction to EQD2. A predictive model was trained to predict RP grade ≥ 1 by logistic regression with L1 norm regularization. The models were then evaluated by the areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUCs). RESULT: The AUCs of both DVH-based models with and without correction of the dose to EQD2 were 0.66 and 0.66, respectively. Both dosiomic-based models with correction of the dose to EQD2 (AUC = 0.70) and without correction of the dose to EQD2 (AUC = 0.71) showed significant improvement in performance when compared to both DVH-based models. There were no significant differences in the performance of the model by correcting the dose to EQD2. CONCLUSION: Dosiomic features can improve the performance of the predictive model for RP compared with that obtained with the DVH-based model. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13014-021-01950-y.