Early prediction of clinical benefit of treating ovarian cancer using quantitative CT image feature analysis

In current clinical trials of treating ovarian cancer patients, how to accurately predict patients’ response to the chemotherapy at an early stage remains an important and unsolved challenge.

To investigate feasibility of applying a new quantitative image analysis method for predicting early response of ovarian cancer patients to chemotherapy in clinical trials.

A dataset of 30 patients was retrospectively selected in this study, among which 12 were responders with 6-month progression-free survival (PFS) and 18 were non-responders. A computer-aided detection scheme was developed to segment tumors depicted on two sets of CT images acquired pre-treatment and 4–6 weeks post treatment. The scheme computed changes of three image features related to the tumor volume, density, and density variance. We analyzed performance of using each image feature and applying a decision tree to predict patients’ 6-month PFS. The prediction accuracy of using quantitative image features was also compared with the clinical record based on the Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumors (RECIST) guideline.

The areas under receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) were 0.773 ± 0.086, 0.680 ± 0.109, and 0.668 ± 0.101, when using each of three features, respectively. AUC value increased to 0.831 ± 0.078 when combining these features together. The decision-tree classifier achieved a higher predicting accuracy (76.7%) than using RECIST guideline (60.0%).

This study demonstrated the potential of using a quantitative image feature analysis method to improve accuracy of predicting early response of ovarian cancer patients to the chemotherapy in clinical trials.