Unraveling Radiomics Complexity: Strategies for Optimal Simplicity in Predictive Modeling

Background: The high dimensionality of radiomic feature sets, the variability in radiomic feature types and potentially high computational requirements all underscore the need for an effective method to identify the smallest set of predictive features for a given clinical problem. Purpose: Develop a methodology and tools to identify and explain the smallest set of predictive radiomic features. Materials and Methods: 89,714 radiomic features were extracted from five cancer datasets: low-grade glioma, meningioma, non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), and two renal cell carcinoma cohorts (n=2104). Features were categorized by computational complexity into morphological, intensity, texture, linear filters, and nonlinear filters. Models were trained and evaluated on each complexity level using the area under the curve (AUC). The most informative features were identified, and their importance was explained. The optimal complexity level and associated most informative features were identified using systematic statistical significance analyses and a false discovery avoidance procedure, respectively. Their predictive importance was explained using a novel tree-based method. Results: MEDimage, a new open-source tool, was developed to facilitate radiomic studies. Morphological features were optimal for MRI-based meningioma (AUC: 0.65) and low-grade glioma (AUC: 0.68). Intensity features were optimal for CECT-based renal cell carcinoma (AUC: 0.82) and CT-based NSCLC (AUC: 0.76). Texture features were optimal for MRI-based renal cell carcinoma (AUC: 0.72). Tuning the Hounsfield unit range improved results for CECT-based renal cell carcinoma (AUC: 0.86). Conclusion: Our proposed methodology and software can estimate the optimal radiomics complexity level for specific medical outcomes, potentially simplifying the use of radiomics in predictive modeling across various contexts.

Federated Learning Enables Big Data for Rare Cancer Boundary Detection

Although machine learning (ML) has shown promise in numerous domains, there are concerns about generalizability to out-of-sample data. This is currently addressed by centrally sharing ample, and importantly diverse, data from multiple sites. However, such centralization is challenging to scale (or even not feasible) due to various limitations. Federated ML (FL) provides an alternative to train accurate and generalizable ML models, by only sharing numerical model updates. Here we present findings from the largest FL study to-date, involving data from 71 healthcare institutions across 6 continents, to generate an automatic tumor boundary detector for the rare disease of glioblastoma, utilizing the largest dataset of such patients ever used in the literature (25,256 MRI scans from 6,314 patients). We demonstrate a 33% improvement over a publicly trained model to delineate the surgically targetable tumor, and 23% improvement over the tumor's entire extent. We anticipate our study to: 1) enable more studies in healthcare informed by large and diverse data, ensuring meaningful results for rare diseases and underrepresented populations, 2) facilitate further quantitative analyses for glioblastoma via performance optimization of our consensus model for eventual public release, and 3) demonstrate the effectiveness of FL at such scale and task complexity as a paradigm shift for multi-site collaborations, alleviating the need for data sharing.