Radiomics analysis on CT images for prediction of radiation-induced kidney damage by machine learning models

We aimed to assess the power of radiomic features based on computed tomography to predict risk of chronic kidney disease in patients undergoing radiation therapy of abdominal cancers.

50 patients were evaluated for chronic kidney disease 12 months after completion of abdominal radiation therapy. At the first step, the region of interest was automatically extracted using deep learning models in computed tomography images. Afterward, a combination of radiomic and clinical features was extracted from the region of interest to build a radiomic signature. Finally, six popular classifiers, including Bernoulli Naive Bayes, Decision Tree, Gradient Boosting Decision Trees, K-Nearest Neighbor, Random Forest, and Support Vector Machine, were used to predict chronic kidney disease. Evaluation criteria were as follows: accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and area under the ROC curve.

Most of the patients (58%) experienced chronic kidney disease. A total of 140 radiomic features were extracted from the segmented area. Among the six classifiers, Random Forest performed best with the accuracy and AUC of 94% and 0.99, respectively.

Based on the quantitative results, we showed that a combination of radiomic and clinical features could predict chronic kidney radiation toxicities. The effect of factors such as renal radiation dose, irradiated renal volume, and urine volume 24-h on CKD was proved in this study.