Quantitative imaging features: extension of the oncology medical image database

Abstract

Radiological imaging is fundamental within the healthcare industry and has become routinely adopted for diagnosis, disease monitoring and treatment planning. With the advent of digital imaging modalities and the rapid growth in both diagnostic and therapeutic imaging, the ability to be able to harness this large influx of data is of paramount importance. The Oncology Medical Image Database (OMI-DB) was created to provide a centralized, fully annotated dataset for research. The database contains both processed and unprocessed images, associated data, and annotations and where applicable expert determined ground truths describing features of interest. Medical imaging provides the ability to detect and localize many changes that are important to determine whether a disease is present or a therapy is effective by depicting alterations in anatomic, physiologic, biochemical or molecular processes. Quantitative imaging features are sensitive, specific, accurate and reproducible imaging measures of these changes. Here, we describe an extension to the OMI-DB whereby a range of imaging features and descriptors are pre-calculated using a high throughput approach. The ability to calculate multiple imaging features and data from the acquired images would be valuable and facilitate further research applications investigating detection, prognosis, and classification. The resultant data store contains more than 10 million quantitative features as well as features derived from CAD predictions. Theses data can be used to build predictive models to aid image classification, treatment response assessment as well as to identify prognostic imaging biomarkers.