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Updated: Apr 30, 2026
Author Spotlight: Investigating Immune Cell Dynamics in the Tumor Microenvironment — Challenges and Innovations in Cancer Prognosis
Published on: April 12, 2024
Development and evaluation of an open-source software package "CGITA" for quantifying tumor heterogeneity with
Yu-Hua Dean Fang1, Chien-Yu Lin2, Meng-Jung Shih3
1Department of Electrical Engineering, College of Engineering, Chang Gung University, Taoyuan 333, Taiwan ; Molecular Imaging Center, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Linkou, Taiwan.
Background:
The quantification of tumor heterogeneity with molecular images, by analyzing the local or global variation in the spatial arrangements of pixel intensity with texture analysis, possesses a great clinical potential for treatment planning and prognosis. To address the lack of available software for computing the tumor heterogeneity on the public domain, we develop a software package, namely, Chang-Gung Image Texture Analysis (CGITA) toolbox, and provide it to the research community as a free, open-source project.
Methods:
With a user-friendly graphical interface, CGITA provides users with an easy way to compute more than seventy heterogeneity indices. To test and demonstrate the usefulness of CGITA, we used a small cohort of eighteen locally advanced oral cavity (ORC) cancer patients treated with definitive radiotherapies.
Results:
In our case study of ORC data, we found that more than ten of the current implemented heterogeneity indices outperformed SUVmean for outcome prediction in the ROC analysis with a higher area under curve (AUC). Heterogeneity indices provide a better area under the curve up to 0.9 than the SUVmean and TLG (0.6 and 0.52, resp.).
Conclusions:
CGITA is a free and open-source software package to quantify tumor heterogeneity from molecular images. CGITA is available for free for academic use at http://code.google.com/p/cgita.
