Clinical application of ¹⁸F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography/computed tomography radiomics-based machine learning analyses in the field of oncology

Machine learning (ML) analyses using F-18-fluorodeoxyglucose (F-18-FDG) positron emission tomography (PET)/computed tomography (CT) radiomics features have been applied in the field of oncology. The current review aimed to summarize the current clinical articles about F-18-FDG PET/CT radiomics-based ML analyses to solve issues in classifying or constructing prediction models for several types of tumors. In these studies, lung and mediastinal tumors were the most commonly evaluated lesions, followed by lymphatic, abdominal, head and neck, breast, gynecological, and other types of tumors. Previous studies have commonly shown that F-18-FDG PET radiomics-based ML analysis has good performance in differentiating benign from malignant tumors, predicting tumor characteristics and stage, therapeutic response, and prognosis by examining significant differences in the area under the receiver operating characteristic curves, accuracies, or concordance indices (> 0.70). However, these studies have reported several ML algorithms. Moreover, different ML models have been applied for the same purpose. Thus, various procedures were used in F-18-FDG PET/CT radiomics-based ML analysis in oncology, and F-18-FDG PET/CT radiomics-based ML models, which are easy and universally applied in clinical practice, would be expected to be established.