Bone radiomics reproducibility: a three-centered study on the impacts of image contrast, edge enhancement, and...

This study aims to measure the reproducibility of radiomics features in ankle bone radiography over changes in post-processing parameters including contrast, edge enhancement and latitude. Lateral ankle bone radiographies for sixty patients were obtained from three digital radiology centers. All images were acquired by same image acquisition settings. A two-dimensional region of interest was drawn in any image and 93 features from 6 feature sets including first and second order were extracted. The coefficient of variation (COV) and intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) were calculated to assess feature reproducibility for each center and among all centers in three scenarios: Adams (Nat Rev Endocrinol 9(1):28, 2013) ten different contrast Brown et al. (J Med Imaging 5(1):011017, 2018) ten different edge enhancement and Hirvasniemi et al. (Osteoarthr Cartilage 27(6):906-914, 2019)  ten different image latitude parameters. Based on ICC analysis, it is observed that 46-100-44% of Histogram, 54-72-42% of GLCM, 43-76-36% of GLDM, 60-90-17% of GLRLM, 33-19-21% of GLSZM and 13-20-0% of NGTDM radiomics features had 90% < ICC < 100% over changes in contrast-edge enhancement-latitude changes respectively. Based on COV, GLRLM was only feature set that 100% of their features had COV ≤ 5% over changes in contrast and edge enhancement. The results presented here, indicating that radiomics features extracted are vulnerable over changes in contrast, edge enhancement and latitude. The most reproducible features that introduced in this study could be used for further clinical decision making.