Selecting radiomic features from FDG-PET images for cancer treatment outcome prediction

As a vital task in cancer therapy, accurately predicting the treatment outcome is valuable for tailoring and adapting a treatment planning. To this end, multi-sources of information (radiomics, clinical characteristics, genomic expressions, etc) gathered before and during treatment are potentially profitable. In this paper, we propose such a prediction system primarily using radiomic features (e.g., texture features) extracted from FDG-PET images. The proposed system includes a feature selection method based on Dempster-Shafer theory, a powerful tool to deal with uncertain and imprecise information. It aims to improve the prediction accuracy, and reduce the imprecision and overlaps between different classes (treatment outcomes) in a selected feature subspace. Considering that training samples are often small-sized and imbalanced in our applications, a data balancing procedure and specified prior knowledge are taken into account to improve the reliability of the selected feature subsets. Finally, the Evidential K-NN (EK-NN) classifier is used with selected features to output prediction results. Our prediction system has been evaluated by synthetic and clinical datasets, consistently showing good performance.