Radiomics digital phantom

The field of radiomics is emerging rapidly; however, the field lacks standardized evaluation of both the scientific integrity and the clinical significance of the numerous published radiomics investigations resulting from this growth. There is a clear and present need for rigorous evaluation criteria and reporting guidelines in order for radiomics to mature as a discipline. We therefore provide guidance together with a novel metric, the radiomics quality score (RQS) and an online digital phantom (DOI:10.17195/candat.2016.08.1), to meet this urgent need for both past and future investigations in the field of radiomics. The objective of the Radiomics digital phantom is to compare different software implementations for radiomic feature extraction algorithms, we provide CT data of the primary tumor region and the corresponding tumor contours of four lung cancer cases, to serve as “real life” digital phantoms. Using the pre-processed image data, we calculated a set of commonly used features to serve as a reference feature dataset. Please see the supplementary material (DOI:10.17195/candat.2016.08.1), for a detailed description of the digital phantom image data and calculated features.