Inter-Observer Reproducibility of [18F]FDG PET/CT Radiomic Features in Primary Breast Carcinoma.

Abstract

Radiomic feature stability is a necessary condition for clinical translation, yet the impact of inter-observer segmentation variability remains insufficiently characterized for [18F]FDG PET/CT in breast carcinoma. We evaluated the inter-observer reproducibility of 107 original radiomic features extracted from [18F]FDG PET/CT images of 42 patients with biopsy-proven, treatment-naive primary breast carcinoma, using an IBSI-aligned PyRadiomics workflow. Two nuclear medicine physicians independently segmented each tumor using semi-automatic Otsu thresholding to generate an initial tumor mask, followed by manual correction. Reproducibility was quantified using ICC(A,1) with bootstrap-derived 95% confidence intervals. A two-stage reproducibility and redundancy-based feature reduction strategy, combining an ICC threshold with Spearman correlation-based redundancy removal, was applied across nine threshold combinations, and features were classified into three pre-specified stability categories. The segmentation agreement was good, with a mean Dice coefficient of 0.847. Most features showed excellent reproducibility (81/107, 75.7% with ICC ≥ 0.90; median ICC 0.972), whereas shape features based on maximum lesion extension showed poor reproducibility (ICC 0.10-0.25). The reduction strategy resulted in 19 stable non-redundant features, with eight retained across all threshold combinations; 79 features (73.8%) met high-stability criteria. These results and the proposed stability classification framework provide a methodological basis for future predictive PET radiomics studies in breast carcinoma.