Radiomics based likelihood functions for cancer diagnosis

Radiomic features based classifiers and neural networks have shown promising results in tumor classification. The classification performance can be further improved greatly by exploring and incorporating the discriminative features towards cancer into mathematical models. In this research work, we have developed two radiomics driven likelihood models in Computed Tomography(CT) images to classify lung, colon, head and neck cancer. Initially, two diagnostic radiomic signatures were derived by extracting 105 3-D features from 200 lung nodules and by selecting the features with higher average scores from several supervised as well as unsupervised feature ranking algorithms. The signatures obtained from both the ranking approaches were integrated into two mathematical likelihood functions for tumor classification. Validation of the likelihood functions was performed on 265 public data sets of lung, colon, head and neck cancer with high classification rate. The achieved results show robustness of the models and suggest that diagnostic mathematical functions using general tumor phenotype can be successfully developed for cancer diagnosis.