The utility of quantitative CT radiomics features for improved prediction of radiation pneumonitis

Purpose The purpose of this study was to explore gains in predictive model performance for radiation pneumonitis (RP) using pretreatment CT radiomics features extracted from the normal lung volume. Methods A total of 192 patients treated for nonsmall cell lung cancer with definitive radiotherapy were considered in the current study. In addition to clinical and dosimetric data, CT radiomics features were extracted from the total lung volume defined using the treatment planning scan. A total of 6851 features (15 clinical, 298 total lung and heart dosimetric, and 6538 image features) were gathered and considered candidate predictors for modeling of RP grade ≥3. Models were built with the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) logistic regression and applied to the set of candidate predictors with 50 iterations of tenfold nested cross‐validation. Results In the current cohort, 30 of 192 patients (15.6%) presented with RP grade ≥3. Average cross‐validated AUC (CV‐AUC) using only the clinical and dosimetric parameters was 0.51. CV‐AUC was 0.68 when total lung CT radiomics features were added. Analysis with the entire set of available predictors revealed seven different image features selected in at least 40% of the model fits. Conclusions We have successfully incorporated CT radiomics features into a framework for building predictive RP models via LASSO logistic regression. Addition of normal lung image features produced superior model performance relative to traditional dosimetric and clinical predictors of RP, suggesting that pretreatment CT radiomics features should be considered in the context of RP prediction.