Reproducible and interpretable spiculation quantification for lung cancer screening Journal Article


Authors: Choi, W.; Nadeem, S.; Alam, S. R.; Deasy, J. O.; Tannenbaum, A.; Lu, W.
Article Title: Reproducible and interpretable spiculation quantification for lung cancer screening
Abstract: Spiculations are important predictors of lung cancer malignancy, which are spikes on the surface of the pulmonary nodules. In this study, we proposed an interpretable and parameter-free technique to quantify the spiculation using area distortion metric obtained by the conformal (angle-preserving) spherical parameterization. We exploit the insight that for an angle-preserved spherical mapping of a given nodule, the corresponding negative area distortion precisely characterizes the spiculations on that nodule. We introduced novel spiculation scores based on the area distortion metric and spiculation measures. We also semi-automatically segment lung nodule (for reproducibility) as well as vessel and wall attachment to differentiate the real spiculations from lobulation and attachment. A simple pathological malignancy prediction model is also introduced. We used the publicly-available LIDC-IDRI dataset pathologists (strong-label) and radiologists (weak-label) ratings to train and test radiomics models containing this feature, and then externally validate the models. We achieved AUC = 0.80 and 0.76, respectively, with the models trained on the 811 weakly-labeled LIDC datasets and tested on the 72 strongly-labeled LIDC and 73 LUNGx datasets; the previous best model for LUNGx had AUC = 0.68. The number-of-spiculations feature was found to be highly correlated (Spearman's rank correlation coefficient ρ=0.44) with the radiologists’ spiculation score. We developed a reproducible and interpretable, parameter-free technique for quantifying spiculations on nodules. The spiculation quantification measures was then applied to the radiomics framework for pathological malignancy prediction with reproducible semi-automatic segmentation of nodule. Using our interpretable features (size, attachment, spiculation, lobulation), we were able to achieve higher performance than previous models. In the future, we will exhaustively test our model for lung cancer screening in the clinic. © 2020 Elsevier B.V.
Keywords: biological organs; diseases; semi-automatic segmentation; statistical tests; lung cancer screening; conformal mapping; reproducibilities; spearman's rank correlation coefficients; distortion metrics; spiculation scores; predictive analytics; spiculation; highly-correlated; spherical parameterization
Journal Title: Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine
Volume: 200
ISSN: 0169-2607
Publisher: Elsevier Ireland Ltd.  
Date Published: 2021-03-01
Start Page: 105839
Language: English
DOI: 10.1016/j.cmpb.2020.105839
PUBMED: 33221055
PROVIDER: scopus
PMCID: PMC7920914
DOI/URL:
Notes: Article -- Export Date: 1 April 2021 -- Source: Scopus
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  1. Joseph Owen Deasy
    524 Deasy
  2. Wei   Lu
    70 Lu
  3. Wookjin   Choi
    21 Choi
  4. Saad Nadeem
    50 Nadeem