Applying a radiomics-based CAD scheme to classify between malignant and benign pancreatic tumors using CT images

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Gai, Tiancheng^{a; *} | Thai, Theresa^b | Jones, Meredith^c | Jo, Javier^a | Zheng, Bin^a

Affiliations: [a] School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA | [b] Department of Radiological Sciences, University of Oklahoma Health Science Center, Oklahoma City, OK, USA | [c] Stephenson School of Biomedical Engineering, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author: Tiancheng Gai, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Oklahoma, 101 David L. Boren Blvd, Suite 1001, Norman, OK 73019, USA. E-mail: [email protected].

Abstract: BACKGROUND:Pancreatic cancer is one of the most aggressive cancers with approximate 10% five-year survival rate. To reduce mortality rate, accurate detection and diagnose of suspicious pancreatic tumors at an early stage plays an important role. OBJECTIVE:To develop and test a new radiomics-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) scheme of computed tomography (CT) images to detect and classify suspicious pancreatic tumors. METHODS:A retrospective dataset consisting of 77 patients who had suspicious pancreatic tumors detected on CT images was assembled in which 33 tumors are malignant. A CAD scheme was developed using the following 5 steps namely, (1) apply an image pre-processing algorithm to filter and reduce image noise, (2) use a deep learning model to detect and segment pancreas region, (3) apply a modified region growing algorithm to segment tumor region, (4) compute and select optimal radiomics features, and (5) train and test a support vector machine (SVM) model to classify the detected pancreatic tumor using a leave-one-case-out cross-validation method. RESULTS:By using the area under receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) as an evaluation index, SVM model yields AUC = 0.750 with 95% confidence interval [0.624, 0.885] to classify pancreatic tumors. CONCLUSIONS:Study results indicate that radiomics features computed from CT images contain useful information associated with risk of tumor malignancy. This study also built a foundation to support further effort to develop and optimize CAD schemes with more advanced image processing and machine learning methods to more accurately and robustly detect and classify pancreatic tumors in future.

Keywords: Pancreatic cancer detection, classification of pancreatic tumor, computer-aided diagnosis (CAD), support vector machine, image segmentation using deep learning model

DOI: 10.3233/XST-211116

Journal: Journal of X-Ray Science and Technology, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 377-388, 2022