Haralick's texture features for the prediction of response to therapy in colorectal cancer: a preliminary study.

PURPOSE: Haralick features Texture analysis is a recent oncologic imaging biomarker used to assess quantitatively the heterogeneity within a tumor. The aim of this study is to evaluate which Haralick's features are the most feasible in predicting tumor response to neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy (CRT) in colorectal cancer. MATERIALS AND METHODS: After MRI and histological assessment, eight patients were enrolled and divided into two groups based on response to neoadjuvant CRT in complete responders (CR) and non-responders (NR). Oblique Axial T2-weighted MRI sequences before CRT were analyzed by two radiologists in consensus drawing a ROI around the tumor. 14 over 192 Haralick's features were extrapolated from normalized gray-level co-occurrence matrix in four different directions. A dedicated statistical analysis was performed to evaluate distribution of the extracted Haralick's features computing mean and standard deviation. RESULTS: Pretreatment MRI examination showed significant value (p < 0.05) of 5 over 14 computed Haralick texture. In particular, the significant features are the following: concerning energy, contrast, correlation, entropy and inverse difference moment. CONCLUSIONS: Five Haralick's features showed significant relevance in the prediction of response to therapy in colorectal cancer and might be used as additional imaging biomarker in the oncologic management of colorectal patients.

OpenKBP-Opt: an international and reproducible evaluation of 76 knowledge-based planning pipelines.

Objective.To establish an open framework for developing plan optimization models for knowledge-based planning (KBP).Approach.Our framework includes radiotherapy treatment data (i.e. reference plans) for 100 patients with head-and-neck cancer who were treated with intensity-modulated radiotherapy. That data also includes high-quality dose predictions from 19 KBP models that were developed by different research groups using out-of-sample data during the OpenKBP Grand Challenge. The dose predictions were input to four fluence-based dose mimicking models to form 76 unique KBP pipelines that generated 7600 plans (76 pipelines × 100 patients). The predictions and KBP-generated plans were compared to the reference plans via: the dose score, which is the average mean absolute voxel-by-voxel difference in dose; the deviation in dose-volume histogram (DVH) points; and the frequency of clinical planning criteria satisfaction. We also performed a theoretical investigation to justify our dose mimicking models.Main results.The range in rank order correlation of the dose score between predictions and their KBP pipelines was 0.50-0.62, which indicates that the quality of the predictions was generally positively correlated with the quality of the plans. Additionally, compared to the input predictions, the KBP-generated plans performed significantly better (P< 0.05; one-sided Wilcoxon test) on 18 of 23 DVH points. Similarly, each optimization model generated plans that satisfied a higher percentage of criteria than the reference plans, which satisfied 3.5% more criteria than the set of all dose predictions. Lastly, our theoretical investigation demonstrated that the dose mimicking models generated plans that are also optimal for an inverse planning model.Significance.This was the largest international effort to date for evaluating the combination of KBP prediction and optimization models. We found that the best performing models significantly outperformed the reference dose and dose predictions. In the interest of reproducibility, our data and code is freely available.