Investigating the Robustness Neighborhood Gray Tone Difference Matrix and Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix Radiomic...

The aim of this study was to determine if optimized imaging protocols across multiple computed tomography (CT) vendors could result in reproducible radiomic features calculated from an anthropomorphic phantom.

Materials with varying degrees of heterogeneity were placed throughout the lungs of the phantom. Twenty scans of the phantom were acquired on 3 CT manufacturers with chest CT protocols that had optimized protocol parameters. Scans were reconstructed using vendor-specific standards and lung kernels. The concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) was used to calculate reproducibility between features. For features with high CCC values, Bland-Altman analysis was also used to quantify agreement.

The mean Hounsfield unit (HU) was 32.93 HU (141.7 to -26.5 HU) for the rubber insert and 347.2 HU (-320.9 to -347.7 HU) for the wood insert. Low CCC values of less than 0.9 were calculated for all features across all scans.

Radiomic features that are derived from the spatial distribution of voxel intensities should be particularly scrutinized for reproducibility in a multivendor environment.