Priority radiomics parameters for computed tomography in head and neck malignancies: a systematic review

Radiomics is the newest and promising direction in modern radiographic diagnostics. The number of head and neck cancer studies with employing radiomics is increasing every year. We performed a systematic review of recent publications (20212023) on computed tomography (CT)-based head and neck malignancies. The search for articles was carried out in the PubMed database. The basic characteristics of the selected articles were extracted and their quality was assessed with RQS 2.0 [3] and the modified QUADAS-CAD questionnaire [17]. We assessed the level of reproducibility of radiomic parameters selected for predictive models in different studies. Eleven articles were selected for our review. In most cases, there was a high risk of systematic error associated with the data imbalance in terms of demographic parameters and level of pathologies. The range of RQS 2.0 scores for the included articles varies from 19.44% to 50.00% of the maximum possible score. The main problems leading to researches quality decreasing are the lack of external validation of the results (73% of the analyzed articles) and the lack of data accessibility and transparency (82%). Inter-study reproducibility of radiomics parameters is low due to the wide variety of techniques used for image acquisition, image post-processing, extraction and statistical processing of radiomics parameters. The basic block of the stable radiomics parameters should be created for the method introducing into clinical practice. The radiomics methods standardization and creating an open radiomics database creation is necessary for this purpose.