Early prediction of radiotherapy-induced parotid shrinkage and toxicity based on CT radiomics and fuzzy classification.

Journal: Artificial intelligence in medicine
Published Date:

Abstract

MOTIVATION: Patients under radiotherapy for head-and-neck cancer often suffer of long-term xerostomia, and/or consistent shrinkage of parotid glands. In order to avoid these drawbacks, adaptive therapy can be planned for patients at risk, if the prediction is obtained timely, before or during the early phase of treatment. Artificial intelligence can address the problem, by learning from examples and building classification models. In particular, fuzzy logic has shown its suitability for medical applications, in order to manage uncertain data, and to build transparent rule-based classifiers. In previous works, clinical, dosimetric and image-based features were considered separately, to find different possible predictors of parotid shrinkage. On the other hand, a few works reported possible image-based predictors of xerostomia, while the combination of different types of features has been little addressed.

Authors

  • Marco Pota
    National Research Council of Italy - Institute for High Performance Computing and Networking (ICAR), Via P. Castellino 111, 80131 Naples, Italy. Electronic address: marco.pota@na.icar.cnr.it.
  • Elisa Scalco
    National Research Council of Italy - Institute of Molecular Bioimaging and Physiology (IBFM), Via F.lli Cervi 93, 20090 Segrate, MI, Italy.
  • Giuseppe Sanguineti
    Radiotherapy, Istituto Nazionale Tumori Regina Elena, Roma, Italy.
  • Alessia Farneti
    Radiotherapy, Istituto Nazionale Tumori Regina Elena, Roma, Italy.
  • Giovanni Mauro Cattaneo
    Medical Physics Department, San Raffaele Scientific Institute, Milano, Italy.
  • Giovanna Rizzo
    National Research Council of Italy - Institute of Molecular Bioimaging and Physiology (IBFM), Via F.lli Cervi 93, 20090 Segrate, MI, Italy.
  • Massimo Esposito
    National Research Council of Italy - Institute for High Performance Computing and Networking (ICAR), Via P. Castellino 111, 80131 Naples, Italy.