A systematic review and meta-analysis of the utility of quantitative, imaging-based approaches to predict radiation-induced toxicity in lung cancer patients

Background and Purpose

To conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of the performance of radiomics, dosiomics and machine learning in generating toxicity prediction in thoracic radiotherapy.

Materials and Methods

An electronic database search was conducted and dual-screened by independent authors to identify eligible studies for systematic review and meta-analysis. Data was extracted and study quality was assessed using TRIPOD for machine learning studies, RQS for Radiomics and RoB for dosiomics.

Results

10,703 studies were identified, and 5,252 entered screening. 104 studies including 23,373 patients were eligible for systematic review. Primary toxicity predicted was radiation pneumonitis (81), followed by esophagitis (12) and lymphopenia (4). Fourty-two studies studying radiation pneumonitis were eligible for meta-analysis, with pooled area-under-curve (AUC) of 0.82 (95% CI 0.79–0.85). Studies with machine learning had the best performance, with classical and deep learning models having similar performance. There is a trend towards an improvement of the performance of models with the year of publication. There is variability in study quality among the three study categories and dosiomic studies scored the highest among these. Publication bias was not observed.

Conclusion

The majority of existing literature using radiomics, dosiomics and machine learning has focused on radiation pneumonitis prediction. Future research should focus on toxicity prediction of other organs at risk and the adoption of these models into clinical practice.