Applications of radiomics-based analysis pipeline for predicting epidermal growth factor receptor mutation status

BACKGROUND: This study aimed to develop a pipeline for selecting the best feature engineering-based radiomic path to predict epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutant lung adenocarcinoma in (18)F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT). METHODS: The study enrolled 115 lung adenocarcinoma patients with EGFR mutation status from June 2016 and September 2017. We extracted radiomics features by delineating regions-of-interest around the entire tumor in (18)F-FDG PET/CT images. The feature engineering-based radiomic paths were built by combining various methods of data scaling, feature selection, and many methods for predictive model-building. Next, a pipeline was developed to select the best path. RESULTS: In the paths from CT images, the highest accuracy was 0.907 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.849, 0.966), the highest area under curve (AUC) was 0.917 (95% CI: 0.853, 0.981), and the highest F1 score was 0.908 (95% CI: 0.842, 0.974). In the paths based on PET images, the highest accuracy was 0.913 (95% CI: 0.863, 0.963), the highest AUC was 0.960 (95% CI: 0.926, 0.995), and the highest F1 score was 0.878 (95% CI: 0.815, 0.941). Additionally, a novel evaluation metric was developed to evaluate the comprehensive level of the models. Some feature engineering-based radiomic paths obtained promising results. CONCLUSIONS: The pipeline is capable of selecting the best feature engineering-based radiomic path. Combining various feature engineering-based radiomic paths could compare their performances and identify paths built with the most appropriate methods to predict EGFR-mutant lung adenocarcinoma in (18)FDG PET/CT. The pipeline proposed in this work can select the best feature engineering-based radiomic path. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12938-022-01049-9.