Radiomics for detecting prostate cancer bone metastases invisible in CT: a proof-of-concept study

OBJECTIVES: To investigate, in patients with metastatic prostate cancer, whether radiomics of computed tomography (CT) image data enables the differentiation of bone metastases not visible on CT from unaffected bone using (68) Ga-PSMA PET imaging as reference standard. METHODS: In this IRB-approved retrospective study, 67 patients (mean age 71 ± 7 years; range: 55–84 years) showing a total of 205 (68) Ga-PSMA-positive prostate cancer bone metastases in the thoraco-lumbar spine and pelvic bone being invisible in CT were included. Metastases and 86 (68) Ga-PSMA-negative bone volumes in the same body region were segmented and further post-processed. Intra- and inter-reader reproducibility was assessed, with ICCs < 0.90 being considered non-reproducible. To account for imbalances in the dataset, data augmentation was performed to achieve improved class balance and to avoid model overfitting. The dataset was split into training, test, and validation set. After a multi-step dimension reduction process and feature selection process, the 11 most important and independent features were selected for statistical analyses. RESULTS: A gradient-boosted tree was trained on the selected 11 radiomic features in order to classify patients’ bones into bone metastasis and normal bone using the training dataset. This trained model achieved a classification accuracy of 0.85 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.76–0.92, p < .001) with 78% sensitivity and 93% specificity. The tuned model was applied on the original, non-augmented dataset resulting in a classification accuracy of 0.90 (95% CI: 0.82–0.98) with 91% sensitivity and 88% specificity. CONCLUSION: Our proof-of-concept study indicates that radiomics may accurately differentiate unaffected bone from metastatic bone, being invisible by the human eye on CT. KEY POINTS: • This proof-of-concept study showed that radiomics applied on CT images may accurately differentiate between bone metastases and metastatic-free bone in patients with prostate cancer. • Future promising applications include automatic bone segmentation, followed by a radiomics classifier, allowing for a screening-like approach in the detection of bone metastases. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00330-021-08245-6.