Vellala A, Mogler C, Haag F, Tollens F, Rudolf H, Pietsch F, Wängler C, Wängler B, Schoenberg SO, Froelich MF, Hertel A. Comparing quantitative image parameters between animal and clinical CT-scanners: a translational phantom study analysis. Front Med (Lausanne). 2024 Jun 5;11:1407235. doi: 10.3389/fmed.2024.1407235.
Purpose: This study compares phantom-based variability of extracted radiomics features from scans on a photon counting CT (PCCT) and an experimental animal PET/CT-scanner (Albira II) to investigate the potential of radiomics for translation from animal models to human scans. While oncological basic research in animal PET/CT has allowed an intrinsic comparison between PET and CT, but no 1:1 translation to a human CT scanner due to resolution and noise limitations, Radiomics as a statistical and thus scale-independent method can potentially close the critical gap.
Methods: Two phantoms were scanned on a PCCT and animal PET/CT-scanner with different scan parameters and then the radiomics parameters were extracted. A Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was conducted. To overcome the limitation of a small dataset, a data augmentation technique was applied. A Ridge Classifier was trained and a Feature Importance- and Cluster analysis was performed.
Results: PCA and Cluster Analysis shows a clear differentiation between phantom types while emphasizing the comparability of both scanners. The Ridge Classifier exhibited a strong training performance with 93% accuracy, but faced challenges in generalization with a test accuracy of 62%.
Conclusion: These results show that radiomics has great potential as a translational tool between animal models and human routine diagnostics, especially using the novel photon counting technique. This is another crucial step towards integration of radiomics analysis into clinical practice.
Keywords: animal models; diagnostic integration; photon counting CT; radiomics; translation