CT imaging

Overview

Computed tomography (CT) imaging: X-ray-based cross-sectional imaging producing 3D volumetric data in Hounsfield units. In oncology research CT is used for staging, radiotherapy simulation (RT planning CT), response assessment, and as the primary input for CT radiomics feature extraction. CT imaging is a broader umbrella term; specialized uses include fdg-pet-ct (metabolic imaging) and ct-radiomics (quantitative feature extraction).

Cross-reference: ct-radiomics describes quantitative feature extraction from CT; dicom-rt-struct describes the DICOM format for contours drawn on CT images.

Used by

  • PMID:38362943 — RT simulation CT scans from 3346 HNC patients at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, acquired on three scanner manufacturers under standard clinical protocols; released as the RADCURE dataset for radiomics and machine-learning research PMID:38362943.
  • PMID:30179230 — multi-modality imaging archive for 215 HNSCC patients at MD Anderson Cancer Center, including diagnostic CT, PET-CT, MRI, and RT simulation CT; 433,384 DICOM files across 3,225 series; released as the TCIA HNSCC collection PMID:30179230.
  • PMID:37397861 — pretreatment contrast-enhanced CT from 2,552 HNSC patients at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre was the primary imaging input for the RADCURE prognostic challenge; CT-derived primary tumor volume was the single most informative imaging feature, included in the top-performing MTLR model (AUROC 0.823 on internal test); CT radiomics did not improve on EMR+volume models PMID:37397861.
  • 3D primary tumor volume measured on CT using 3D Slicer in TRACERx; tumor volume correlated linearly with mean clonal plasma VAF (Spearman’s rho=0.63, P<0.001, n=37) PMID:28445469

Notes

  • CT acquisition parameters (slice thickness, kVp, mA, reconstruction kernel) vary substantially across institutions and scanner generations; this heterogeneity is a known source of radiomic feature instability PMID:38362943.
  • CT-derived body-composition measurements (skeletal muscle and adipose cross-sectional area at L3) are a specialized downstream use in the HNSCC archive PMID:30179230; see body-composition-ct.

Sources

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