Quality reporting of radiomics analysis in pituitary adenomas: promoting clinical translation

Abstract

Objective: To evaluate the quality of radiomics studies on pituitary adenoma according to the radiomics quality score (RQS) and Transparent Reporting of a multivariable prediction model for Individual Prognosis Or Diagnosis (TRIPOD).

Methods: PubMed MEDLINE and EMBASE were searched to identify radiomics studies on pituitary adenomas. From 138 articles, 20 relevant original research articles were included. Studies were scored based on RQS and TRIPOD guidelines.

Results: Most included studies did not perform pre-processing; isovoxel resampling, signal intensity normalization, and N4 bias field correction were performed in only five (25%), eight (40%), and four (20%) studies, respectively. Only two (10%) studies performed external validation. The mean RQS and basic adherence rate were 2.8 (7.6%) and 26.6%, respectively. There was a low adherence rate for conducting comparison to "gold-standard" (20%), multiple segmentation (25%), and stating potential clinical utility (25%). No study stated the biological correlation, conducted a test-retest or phantom study, was a prospective study, conducted cost-effectiveness analysis, or provided open-source code and data, which resulted in low-level evidence. The overall adherence rate for TRIPOD was 54.6%, and it was low for reporting the title (5%), abstract (0%), explaining the sample size (10%), and suggesting a full prediction model (5%).

Conclusion: The radiomics reporting quality for pituitary adenoma is insufficient. Pre-processing is required for feature reproducibility and external validation is necessary. Feature reproducibility, clinical utility demonstration, higher evidence levels, and open science are required. Titles, abstracts, and full prediction model suggestions should be improved for transparent reporting.

Advances in knowledge: Despite the rapidly increasing number of radiomics researches on pituitary adenoma, the quality of science in these researches is unknown. Our study indicates that the overall quality needs to be significantly improved in radiomics studies on pituitary adenoma, and since the concept of RQS and IBSI is still unfamiliar to clinicians and radiologist researchers, our study may help to reach higher technical and clinical impact in the future study.