Discovery Radiomics for Pathologically-Proven Computed Tomography Lung Cancer Prediction

TL;DR

This paper introduces discovery radiomics using deep convolutional neural networks to improve lung cancer prediction accuracy from CT scans, achieving better results than existing methods.

Contribution

The study presents a novel deep learning-based discovery radiomics framework for lung cancer prediction, utilizing custom radiomic sequencers learned through CNN architecture.

Findings

Achieved 77.52% average accuracy in cancer prediction

Attained 79.06% sensitivity and 76.11% specificity

Surpassed state-of-the-art methods in performance

Abstract

Lung cancer is the leading cause for cancer related deaths. As such, there is an urgent need for a streamlined process that can allow radiologists to provide diagnosis with greater efficiency and accuracy. A powerful tool to do this is radiomics: a high-dimension imaging feature set. In this study, we take the idea of radiomics one step further by introducing the concept of discovery radiomics for lung cancer prediction using CT imaging data. In this study, we realize these custom radiomic sequencers as deep convolutional sequencers using a deep convolutional neural network learning architecture. To illustrate the prognostic power and effectiveness of the radiomic sequences produced by the discovered sequencer, we perform cancer prediction between malignant and benign lesions from 97 patients using the pathologically-proven diagnostic data from the LIDC-IDRI dataset. Using the clinically provided pathologically-proven data as ground truth, the proposed framework provided an average accuracy of 77.52% via 10-fold cross-validation with a sensitivity of 79.06% and specificity of 76.11%, surpassing the state-of-the art method.