Stability assessment of first order statistics features computed on ADC maps in soft-tissue sarcoma

Radiomics extracts a large number of features from medical images to perform a quantitative characterization. Aim of this study was to assess radiomic features stability and relevance. Apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) maps were computed from diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance images (DW-MRI) of 18 patients diagnosed with soft-tissue sarcomas (STSs). Thirty-seven intensity-based features were computed on the regions of interest (ROIs). First, ROIs of the images were subjected to translations and rotations in specific ranges. The 37 features computed on the original and transformed ROIs were compared in terms of percentage of variations. The intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) was computed. To be accepted, a feature should satisfy the following conditions: the ICC after a minimum entity transformation is > 0.6 and the ICC after a maximum entity translation is < 0.4. In total, 31 features out of 37 were accepted by the algorithm. This stability analysis can be used as a first step in the features selection process.