The impact of harmonization on radiomic features in Parkinson’s disease and healthy controls: A multicenter study

Radiomics is a challenging development area in imaging field that is greatly capturing interest of radiologists and neuroscientists. However, radiomics features show a strong non-biological variability determined by different facilities and imaging protocols, limiting the reproducibility and generalizability of analysis frameworks. Our study aimed to investigate the usefulness of harmonization to reduce site-effects on radiomics features over specific brain regions. We selected T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) by using the MRI dataset Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI) from different sites with healthy controls (HC) and Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients. First, the investigation of radiomics measure discrepancies were assessed on healthy brain regions-of-interest (ROIs) via a classification pipeline based on LASSO feature selection and support vector machine (SVM) model. Then, a ComBat-based harmonization approach was applied to correct site-effects. Finally, a validation step on PD subjects evaluated diagnostic accuracy before and after harmonization of radiomics data. Results on healthy subjects demonstrated a dependence from site-effects that could be corrected with ComBat harmonization. LASSO regressor after harmonization was unable to select any feature to distinguish controls by site. Moreover, harmonized radiomics features achieved an area under the receiving operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.77 (compared to AUC of 0.71 for raw radiomics measures) in distinguish Parkinson’s patients from HC. We found a not-negligible site-effect studying radiomics of HC pre- and post-harmonization of features. Our validation study on PD patients demonstrated a significant influence of non-biological noise source in diagnostic performances. Finally, harmonization of multicenter radiomic data represent a necessary step to make analysis pipelines reliable and replicable for multisite neuroimaging studies.