Quantification of lung function on CT images based on pulmonary radiomic filtering

TL;DR

This study develops a radiomics filtering method to quantify regional lung ventilation on CT images, correlating radiomic features with functional imaging to potentially enhance lung assessment.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel radiomics filtering technique that captures spatial-encoded lung information and correlates it with functional imaging, offering a new biomarker for lung ventilation.

Findings

Certain radiomic features strongly correlate with functional imaging.

The method reveals heterogeneity in lung parenchyma related to ventilation defects.

Radiomics can complement existing lung quantification techniques.

Abstract

Purpose: To develop a radiomics filtering technique for characterizing spatial-encoded regional pulmonary ventilation information on lung CT. Methods: The lung volume was segmented on 46 CT images, and a 3D sliding window kernel was implemented across the lung volume to capture the spatial-encoded image information. Fifty-three radiomic features were extracted within the kernel, resulting in a 4th order tensor object. As such, each voxel coordinate of the original lung was represented as a 53-dimensional feature vector, such that radiomic features could be viewed as feature maps within the lungs. To test the technique as a potential pulmonary ventilation biomarker, the radiomic feature maps were compared to paired functional images (Galligas PET or DTPA-SPECT) based on Spearman correlation (r) analysis. Results: The radiomic feature map GLRLM-based Run-Length Non-Uniformity and GLCOM-based Sum Average are found to be highly correlated with the functional imaging. The achieved r (median [range]) for the two features are 0.46 [0.05, 0.67] and 0.45 [0.21, 0.65] across 46 patients and 2 functional imaging modalities, respectively. Conclusions: The results provide evidence that local regions of sparsely encoded heterogeneous lung parenchyma on CT are associated with diminished radiotracer uptake and measured lung ventilation defects on PET/SPECT imaging. These findings demonstrate the potential of radiomics to serve as a complementary tool to the current lung quantification techniques and provide hypothesis-generating data for future studies.