Tumor heterogeneity estimation for radiomics in cancer

Radiomics is an emerging field of medical image analysis research where quantitative measurements are obtained from radiological images that can be utilized to predict patient outcomes and inform treatment decisions. Cancer patients routinely undergo radiological evaluations when images of various modalities including computed tomography, positron emission tomography, and magnetic resonance images are collected for diagnosis and for evaluation of disease progression. Tumor characteristics, often referred to as measures of tumor heterogeneity, can be computed using these clinical images and used as predictors of disease progression and patient survival. Several approaches for quantifying tumor heterogeneity have been proposed, including intensity histogram-based measures, shape and volume-based features, and texture analysis. Taking into account the topology of the tumors we propose a statistical framework for estimating tumor heterogeneity using clustering based on Markov random field theory. We model the voxel intensities using a Gaussian mixture model using a Gibbs prior to incorporate voxel neighborhood information. We propose a novel approach to choosing the number of mixture components. Subsequently, we show that the proposed procedure outperforms the existing approaches when predicting lung cancer survival.