Quantitative chest X-ray radiomics for therapy response monitoring in patients with pulmonary tuberculosis

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Authors

Du Plessis, Tamarisk
Rae, William Ian Duncombe
Ramkilawon, Gopika Devi
Martinson, Neil Alexander
Sathekge, Mike Machaba

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

MDPI

Abstract

Tuberculosis (TB) remains the second leading cause of death globally from a single infectious agent, and there is a critical need to develop improved imaging biomarkers and aid rapid assessments of responses to therapy. We aimed to utilize radiomics, a rapidly developing image analysis tool, to develop a scoring system for this purpose. A chest X-ray radiomics score (RadScore) was developed by implementing a unique segmentation method, followed by feature extraction and parameter map construction. Signature parameter maps that showed a high correlation to lung pathology were consolidated into four frequency bins to obtain the RadScore. A clinical score (TBscore) and a radiological score (RLscore) were also developed based on existing scoring algorithms. The correlation between the change in the three scores, calculated from serial X-rays taken while patients received TB therapy, was evaluated using Spearman’s correlation. Poor correlations were observed between the changes in the TBscore and the RLscore (0.09 (p-value = 0.36)) and the TBscore and the RadScore (0.02 (p-value = 0.86)). The changes in the RLscore and the RadScore had a much stronger correlation of 0.22, which is statistically significant (p-value = 0.02). This shows that the developed RadScore has the potential to be a quantitative monitoring tool for responses to therapy.

Description

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT : Data are available on request from the corresponding author.

Keywords

Radiomics, Segmentation, Feature extraction, Chest X-rays, Radiomics score, Tuberculosis (TB), SDG-03: Good health and well-being

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG-03:Good heatlh and well-being

Citation

Du Plessis, T.; Rae, W.I.D.; Ramkilawon, G.; Martinson, N.A.; Sathekge, M.M. Quantitative Chest X-ray Radiomics for Therapy Response Monitoring in Patients with Pulmonary Tuberculosis. Diagnostics 2023, 13, 2842. https://DOI.org/10.3390/diagnostics13172842.