Using Radiomics to improve the 2-year survival of Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer Patients

This thesis both exploits and further contributes enhancements to the utilization of radiomics (extracted quantitative features of radiological imaging data) for improving cancer survival prediction. Several machine learning methods were compared in this analysis, including but not limited to support vector machines, convolutional neural networks and logistic regression.A technique for analysing prognostic image characteristics, for non-small cell lung cancer based on the edge regions, as well as tissues immediately surrounding visible tumours is developed. Regions external to and neighbouring a tumour were shown to also have prognostic value. By using the additional texture features an increase in accuracy, of 3%, is shown over previous approaches for predicting two-year survival, which has been determined by examining the outside rind tissue including the tumour compared to the volume without the rind. This indicates that while the centre of the tumour is currently the main clinical target for radiotherapy treatment, the tissue immediately around the tumour is also clinically important for survival analysis. Further, it was found that improved prediction resulted up to some 6 pixels outside the tumour volume, a distance of approximately 5mm outside the original gross tumour volume (GTV), when applying a support vector machine, which achieved the highest accuracy of 71.18%. This research indicates the periphery of the tumour is highly predictive of survival. To our knowledge this is the first study that has concentrically expanded and analysed the NSCLC rind for radiomic analysis.