CT Reconstruction Kernels and the Effect of Pre- and Post-Processing on the Reproducibility of Handcrafted Radiomic Features

Handcrafted radiomics features (HRFs) are quantitative features extracted from medical images to decode biological information to improve clinical decision making. Despite the potential of the field, limitations have been identified. The most important identified limitation, currently, is the sensitivity of HRF to variations in image acquisition and reconstruction parameters. In this study, we investigated the use of Reconstruction Kernel Normalization (RKN) and ComBat harmonization to improve the reproducibility of HRFs across scans acquired with different reconstruction kernels. A set of phantom scans (n = 28) acquired on five different scanner models was analyzed. HRFs were extracted from the original scans, and scans were harmonized using the RKN method. ComBat harmonization was applied on both sets of HRFs. The reproducibility of HRFs was assessed using the concordance correlation coefficient. The difference in the number of reproducible HRFs in each scenario was assessed using McNemar's test. The majority of HRFs were found to be sensitive to variations in the reconstruction kernels, and only six HRFs were found to be robust with respect to variations in reconstruction kernels. The use of RKN resulted in a significant increment in the number of reproducible HRFs in 19 out of the 67 investigated scenarios (28.4%), while the ComBat technique resulted in a significant increment in 36 (53.7%) scenarios. The combination of methods resulted in a significant increment in 53 (79.1%) scenarios compared to the HRFs extracted from original images. Since the benefit of applying the harmonization methods depended on the data being harmonized, reproducibility analysis is recommended before performing radiomics analysis. For future radiomics studies incorporating images acquired with similar image acquisition and reconstruction parameters, except for the reconstruction kernels, we recommend the systematic use of the pre- and post-processing approaches (respectively, RKN and ComBat).