Abstract:
Cancer ranks as the leading cause of death worldwide. Especially cancers like soft
tissue sarcomas of extremities (STSE) pose a challenge in oncological
management. Thus, the assessment of prognosis in patients with such cancers is
important for making medical decisions. Radiomics is a promising approach that
has shown a wide range of potential applications including predicting prognosis.
Therefore, this study focused on finding out whether the morphometry-based
radiomics features could be used to predict the prognosis of patients with STSE
following radiotherapy. Thirty patients with histologically proven STSE following
radiotherapy were retrospectively evaluated. The deidentified images, contours
and clinical data from The Cancer Imaging Archive were utilized. Twenty-nine
three-dimensional morphometric features were extracted for each patient. For each
morphometric feature, whether there was a significant difference between the
patients who developed recurrence or metastasis and patients who were recurrence
or metastasis-free after radiotherapy, was tested using the two-sample t-test (onetailed) with the 95% confidence level. Among the extracted features oriented
minimum bounding box-based volume density was uniform across all patients and
the centre of mass shift was also uniform for all the patients except for one.
Excluding those two features p-values were obtained for each morphometric
feature. According to the results surface-to-volume ratio demonstrated a
significant difference (p-value of 0.029) between the patients who developed
recurrence or metastasis and the patients who were free of recurrence or
metastasis after receiving radiotherapy for STSE. Therefore, morphometric
features such as surface-to-volume ratio could be utilized as predictors for
assessing the prognosis of patients with STSE following radiotherapy.
