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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Oncol.
Sec. Radiation Oncology
Volume 14 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fonc.2024.1408752

Repeatability, Reproducibility, and the Effects of Radiotherapy on Radiomic Features of Lowfield MR-LINAC Images of the Prostate

Provisionally accepted

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Definitive radiotherapy (RT) has been shown to be a successful method of treating prostate cancer (PCa) patients. Through radiomics, a quantitative analysis of medical images, it is possible to adapt treatment early on, which may prevent or mitigate future adverse events. During RT of PCa, lowfield magnetic resonance (MR) images, taken with a LINAC onboard imaging system in a process known as magnetic resonance-guided radiotherapy (MRgRT), are used to improve treatment accuracy via superior setup compared to x-ray methods. This work investigated baseline repeatability of radiomic features (RFs) by comparing planning MR images (pMR) with firstfraction setup images (FX1) taken with onboard MRI. The changes in RFs following RT were also looked at with the use of last-fraction setup images (FX5). Earlier research has investigated the use of planning images from cone beam CT (CBCT), but to our knowledge no research has previously shown the relationship with onboard MRI. The correlation between FX1 images and 3T diagnostic MR (dT2) images was also studied. Forty-three first and second order radiomic features extracted from these images were compared by calculating Lin's concordance correlation coefficient (with Benjamini-Hochberg correction for multiple comparisons) between the modalities. FX1 and pMR images were correlated (p<0.05) for all but one RF. 12 RFs correlated between pMR and dT2 images. There was a noticeable change in correlation values for RFs when looking at FX1 and FX5 images, with only 15 correlating significantly. The change in correlation values between pMR and FX5 images was comparable to that between FX1 and FX5 images, with 33 features having a CCC value deviation of less than 0.1. These results demonstrate that RF features are repeatable across different images of the same modality without treatment intervention. This study has also shown a noticeable, reproducible change in RFs as RT goes on.Reproducibility of RFs between different modalities was not strong. This study demonstrated that we can reliably use onboard MRI to observe day-to-day feature changes as a result of RT.

    Keywords: Radiomics, Prostate, repeatability, reproducibility, T2, MRI, MR-linac, ViewRay

    Received: 28 Mar 2024; Accepted: 24 Dec 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Anderson, Dogan, Ford, Padgett, Stoyanova, Abramowitz, Dal Pra and Delgadillo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Rodrigo Delgadillo, University of Miami, Coral Gables, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.