Exhibit Hall | Forum 9
Purpose: To develop a new radiomics paradigm for sparse, time-series imaging data, where features are extracted from a spatial-temporal manifold modeling the time evolution between images.
Methods: We developed an algorithm to model the temporal evolution between two images, ImageA and ImageB, acquired at t=0 and t>0, respectively. Images serve as no-flux boundary conditions of the Fokker-Planck partial differential equation, where ImageA is an excited-state and ImageB is an equilibrium-state. To model in-between timeframes, we propagate pixels according to Fokker-Planck dynamics. This transformation is driven by an underlying potential force uniquely determined by the equilibrium. It generates a spatial-temporal manifold (4th-order tensor; 3 spatial dimensions + time), from which radiomic features are characterized by their continuous rate-of-change. First, our approach was numerically verified by stochastically sampling dynamic Gaussian processes of monotonically decreasing noise. The transformation from high-to-low noise was compared between Fokker-Planck estimation and simulated ground-truth. Second, we conducted a patient study to estimate early metabolic response of patients undergoing definitive radiotherapy for oropharyngeal cancer. 18F-FDG PET images from 57 patients were acquired pre-treatment (ImageA) and two-weeks intra-treatment after 20Gy (ImageB). Each patient’s metabolic time-evolution was modeled, from which image energy and entropy were calculated as a function-of-time and compared to 5-year cancer recurrence.
Results: Numerical results confirmed our technique can recover image noise characteristics given sparse input data as boundary conditions. Compared to ground-truth, the estimated impulse response of energy and entropy achieved cross-correlations of 0.82 and 0.94, respectively. Our patient study demonstrated a measurable difference in energy rate-of-change between patients with-and-without recurrence (RMSE=2.9%). Recurrent tumor energy changed faster than non-recurrent tumor energy, suggesting early metabolic response is linked to how quickly disease becomes metabolically homogenous.
Conclusion: We developed, verified, and applied a new approach to sparse, time-series image characterization via data assimilation of radiomics with partial differential equations.
Funding Support, Disclosures, and Conflict of Interest: DOD\CDMRP W81XWH2110248
Modeling, Nonlinear Dynamics, PET
IM/TH- Image Analysis (Single Modality or Multi-Modality): Imaging biomarkers and radiomics