Du Plessis Tamarisk, Rae William Ian Duncombe, Ramkilawon Gopika, Martinson Neil Alexander, Sathekge Mike Michael
Department of Nuclear Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0001, South Africa.
Medical Imaging Department, Prince of Wales Hospital, Sydney, NSW 2031, Australia.
Diagnostics (Basel). 2023 Sep 1;13(17):2842. doi: 10.3390/diagnostics13172842.
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 (-value = 0.36)) and the TBscore and the RadScore (0.02 (-value 0.86)). The changes in the RLscore and the RadScore had a much stronger correlation of 0.22, which is statistically significant (-value 0.02). This shows that the developed RadScore has the potential to be a quantitative monitoring tool for responses to therapy.
结核病（TB）仍然是全球单一传染源导致死亡的第二大原因，因此迫切需要开发更好的成像生物标志物并辅助快速评估治疗反应。我们旨在利用快速发展的图像分析工具——放射组学来开发一个用于此目的的评分系统。通过实施一种独特的分割方法，随后进行特征提取和参数图构建，开发了胸部X线放射组学评分（RadScore）。将与肺部病理学显示高度相关性的特征参数图整合到四个频率区间以获得RadScore。还基于现有的评分算法开发了临床评分（TBscore）和放射学评分（RLscore）。使用Spearman相关性评估在患者接受结核病治疗期间拍摄的系列X线片中计算出的三个评分变化之间的相关性。观察到TBscore与RLscore的变化之间相关性较差（0.09（P值 = 0.36））以及TBscore与RadScore的变化之间相关性较差（0.02（P值 0.86））。RLscore与RadScore的变化具有更强的相关性，为0.22，具有统计学意义（P值 0.02）。这表明所开发的RadScore有潜力成为治疗反应的定量监测工具。
