Abstract
Metabolic images from Positron Emission Tomography (PET) are used routinely for diagnosis, follow-up or treatment planning purposes of cancer patients. In this study we aimed at determining if radiomic features extracted from 18F-Fluoro Deoxy Glucose (FDG) PET images could mirror tumor transcriptomics. In this study we analyzed 45 patients with locally advanced head and neck cancer (H&N) that underwent FDG-PET scans at the time of diagnosis and transcriptome analysis using RNAs from both cancer and healthy tissues on microarrays. Association between PET radiomics and transcriptomics was carried out with the Genomica software and a functional annotation was used to associate PET radiomics, gene expression and altered biological pathways. We identified relationships between PET radiomics and genes involved in cell-cycle, disease, DNA repair, extracellular matrix organization, immune system, metabolism or signal transduction pathways, according to the Reactome classification. Our results suggest that these FDG PET radiomic features could be used to infer tissue gene expression and cellular pathway activity in H&N cancers. These observations strengthen the value of radiomics as a promising approach to personalize treatments through targeting tumor-specific molecular processes.
Highlights
Metabolic images from Positron Emission Tomography (PET) are used routinely for diagnosis, follow-up or treatment planning purposes of cancer patients
It was shown that one oncogenic epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutation could be associated with 18FDG PET image features[28]
Upon comparing head and neck cancer (H&N) samples to normal ones (12 women, 33 men; mean age 60.6, range [40; 76], Table 1, Fig. 1A), a total of 3315 probes were identified from the transcriptomic analysis (Fig. 1B) with a pBH < 0.01 and a fold-change > 2 between the tumor biopsy/area and the adjacent macroscopically normal biopsy/area
Summary
Metabolic images from Positron Emission Tomography (PET) are used routinely for diagnosis, follow-up or treatment planning purposes of cancer patients. Our results suggest that these FDG PET radiomic features could be used to infer tissue gene expression and cellular pathway activity in H&N cancers These observations strengthen the value of radiomics as a promising approach to personalize treatments through targeting tumor-specific molecular processes. Radiomics have shown potential for predicting the response to therapy or as prognostic factors of patient survival (including disease-free survival, overall survival or recurrence-free survival) in different cancer types[8,22,23]. Despite these encouraging results, there are still numerous unanswered questions regarding the biological significance of PET radiomics, and their actual impact on overall patient management. It would be informative to determine the relationships between transcriptomics and 18F-FDG PET radiomics, in order to obtain functional information relative to glucose metabolism, which most often represents a routine diagnosis and staging procedure in most cancers
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