Quantitative ultrasound delta-radiomics during radiotherapy for monitoring treatment responses in head and neck malignancies

Aim: We investigated quantitative ultrasound (QUS) in patients with node-positive head and neck malignancies for monitoring responses to radical radiotherapy (RT).

Materials & methods: QUS spectral and texture parameters were acquired from metastatic lymph nodes 24 h, 1 and 4 weeks after starting RT. K-nearest neighbor and naive-Bayes machine-learning classifiers were used to build prediction models for each time point. Response was detected after 3 months of RT, and patients were classified into complete and partial responders.

Results: Single-feature naive-Bayes classification performed best with a prediction accuracy of 80, 86 and 85% at 24 h, week 1 and 4, respectively.

Conclusion: QUS-radiomics can predict RT response at 3 months as early as 24 h with reasonable accuracy, which further improves into 1 week of treatment.