Quantitative analysis on the dynamic changes in heart beat cycle of radiomics characteristics in left ventricular myocardial CT / 中华放射医学与防护杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective:To provide a feasible method for the evaluation of cardiac function based on cardiac gated 4DCT, the radiomics technology combined with enhanced ECG gated 4DCT images were used to quantitatively analyze the changes of left ventricular CT radiomics characteristics in cardiac cycle.Methods:The enhanced ECG 4DCT images of 14 patients were reconstructed at intervals of 5% of cardiac cycle. The left ventricular muscle (LVM) and the contrast agent well filled area of left ventricular were delineated with a 13 mm diameter sphere (Cardiac Region of Interest, cardiac ROI) in a single phase. 3Dslicer software was used to extract 92 features of all the sketches, analyze the distribution of CT values on the cardiac ROI and LVM, and preliminarily screen the stable features based on the cardiac ROI (one-way ANOVA). The stable features were used to further screen LVM (one-way ANOVA) to get the difference features. Wilcoxon rank sum test was used to analyze the change of characteristics with heartbeat in the heartbeat cycle.Results:In the heartbeat cycle the mean CT values of cardiac cavity ROI in cardiac cavity changed less than that in LVM, with the change rates of 9.23% and 17.88%, respectively. There were 36 stable features with no significant difference in cardiac cavity ROI ( P>0.05). 20 of them were statistically significant ( F=1.641-6.206, P<0.05), and the average change rate was 98.63%, such as median (-103.96%) and mean (123.67%) of the first order matrix, gray level non uniformity (99.81%) of GLDM matrix and other changes reached more than 99%. The differences between the maximum and minimum values in different cardiac cycles were statistically significant ( Z=-3.921--3.173, P<0.05). Conclusions:With the combination of radiomics and enhanced ECG 4DCT image, the microscopic changes of CT image features in the cardiac cycle can be amplifed. A new method for the assessment of left ventricular function changes was provided. The features such as median, mean may have more application potential.