We investigated the association between the textural features obtained from F-FDG images, metabolic parameters (SUVmax SUVmean, MTV, TLG), and tumor histopathological characteristics (stage and Ki-67 proliferation index) in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The FDG-PET images of 67 patients with NSCLC were evaluated. MATLAB technical computing language was employed in the extraction of 137 features by using first order statistics (FOS), gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM), gray-level run length matrix (GLRLM), and Laws' texture filters. Textural features and metabolic parameters were statistically analyzed in terms of good discrimination power between tumor stages, and selected features/parameters were used in the automatic classification by k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) and support vector machines (SVM). We showed that one textural feature (gray-level nonuniformity, GLN) obtained using GLRLM approach and nine textural features using Laws' approach were successful in discriminating all tumor stages, unlike metabolic parameters. There were significant correlations between Ki-67 index and some of the textural features computed using Laws' method (r = 0.6, p = 0.013). In terms of automatic classification of tumor stage, the accuracy was approximately 84% with k-NN classifier (k = 3) and SVM, using selected five features. Texture analysis of FDG-PET images has a potential to be an objective tool to assess tumor histopathological characteristics. The textural features obtained using Laws' approach could be useful in the discrimination of tumor stage.

Lung cancer is one of the deadliest cancer types whose 84% is non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). In this study, deep learning-based classification methods were investigated comprehensively to differentiate two subtypes of NSCLC, namely adenocarcinoma (ADC) and squamous cell carcinoma (SqCC). The study used 1457 18 F-FDG PET images/slices with tumor from 94 patients (88 men), 38 of which were ADC and the rest were SqCC. Three experiments were carried out to examine the contribution of peritumoral areas in PET images on subtype classification of tumors. We assessed multilayer perceptron (MLP) and three convolutional neural network (CNN) models such as SqueezeNet, VGG16 and VGG19 using three kinds of images in these experiments: 1) Whole slices without cropping or segmentation, 2) cropped image portions (square subimages) that include the tumor and 3) segmented image portions corresponding to tumors using random walk method. Several optimizers and regularization methods were used to optimize each model for the diagnostic classification. The classification models were trained and evaluated by performing stratified 10-fold cross validation, and F-score and area-under-curve (AUC) metrics were used to quantify the performance. According to our results, it is possible to say that inclusion of peritumoral regions/tissues both contributes to the success of models and makes segmentation effort unnecessary. To the best of our knowledge, deep learning-based models have not been applied to the subtype classification of NSCLC in PET imaging, therefore, this study is a significant cornerstone providing thorough comparisons and evaluations of several deep learning models on metabolic imaging for lung cancer. Even simpler deep learning models are found promising in this domain, indicating that any improvement in deep learning models in machine learning community can be reflected well in this domain as well.

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Lung cancer is one of the deadly cancer types, and almost 85% of lung cancers are nonsmall cell lung cancer (NSCLC). In the present study we investigated classification and feature selection methods for the differentiation of two subtypes of NSCLC, namely adenocarcinoma (ADC) and squamous cell carcinoma (SqCC). The major advances in understanding the effects of therapy agents suggest that future targeted therapies will be increasingly subtype specific.We obtained positron emission tomography (PET) images of 93 patients with NSCLC, 39 of which had ADC while the rest had SqCC. Random walk segmentation was applied to delineate three-dimensional tumor volume, and 39 texture features were extracted to grade the tumor subtypes. We examined 11 classifiers with two different feature selection methods and the effect of normalization on accuracy. The classifiers we used were the k-nearest-neighbor, logistic regression, support vector machine, Bayesian network, decision tree, radial basis function network, random forest, AdaBoostM1, and three stacking methods. To evaluate the prediction accuracy we performed a leave-one-out cross-validation experiment on the dataset. We also considered optimizing certain hyperparameters of these models by performing 10-fold cross-validation separately on each training set. We found that the stacking ensemble classifier, which combines a decision tree, AdaBoostM1, and logistic regression methods by a metalearner, was the most accurate method for detecting subtypes of NSCLC, and normalization of feature sets improved the accuracy of the classification method.

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