Research

Our paper “Novel Functional Radiomics for Prediction of Cardiac Positron Emission Tomography Avidity in Lung Cancer Radiotherapy” has been published in JCO CCI. This research work delves into an innovative approach to predict clinical cardiac assessment using functional imaging. Note: This post summarizes broader functional cardiac PET radiomics work. Only one related presentation below is specifically a delta-radiomics analysis. Abstract: Traditional methods for evaluating cardiotoxicity primarily focus on radiation doses to the heart. However, functional imaging offers the potential to enhance early prediction of cardiotoxicity in lung cancer patients undergoing radiotherapy. In this context, Fluorine-18 (18F) fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG)-positron emission tomography (PET)/computed tomography (CT) imaging plays a crucial role. This study aims to develop a radiomics model that predicts clinical cardiac assessment using 18F-FDG PET/CT scans before thoracic radiation therapy. ...

AAPM Annual Meeting (Houston, TX • July 23 ‒ 27, 2023) Novel Functional Delta-Radiomics for Predicting Overall Survival in Lung Cancer Radiotherapy Using Cardiac FDG-PET Uptake Wookjin Choi, Yevgeniy Vinogradskiy Interactive ePoster Discussions: Sunday, July 23, 2023: 3:00 PM - 3:30 PM, GRBCC, Exhibit Hall | Forum 6 SU-300-IePD-F6-4 Novel Functional Delta-Radiomics for Predicting Overall Survival in Lung Cancer Radiotherapy Using Cardiac FDG-PET Uptake Deep Learning Segmentation for Accurate GTV and OAR Segmentation in MR-Guided Adaptive Radiotherapy for Pancreatic Cancer Patients Wookjin Choi, Hamidreza Nourzadeh, Yingxuan Chen, Christopher G. Ainsley, Vimal K. Desai, Alexander A. Kubli, Yevgeniy Vinogradskiy, Maria Werner-Wasik, Adam Mueller, and Karen E. Mooney PO-GePV-D-50 Deep Learning Segmentation for Accurate GTV and OAR Segmentation in MR-Guided Adaptive Radiotherapy for Pancreatic Cancer Patients ...

Varian will support my research project entitled “Longitudinal CBCT radiomics analysis for lung cancer radiotherapy response and prognosis prediction” with $230,000 over 2 years. This is the first research grant from Varian to the Department of Radiation Oncology, Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University. This project can potentially impact the clinical practice of lung cancer patients by using standard imaging modalities (CBCT and 4D-CBCT) to provide early prediction of prognosis and toxicity. ...

MICCAI'22 Paper | CMPB'21 Paper | CIRDataset This library serves as a one-stop solution for analyzing datasets using clinically-interpretable radiomics (CIR) in cancer imaging (https://github.com/choilab-jefferson/CIR). The primary motivation for this comes from our collaborators in radiology and radiation oncology inquiring about the importance of clinically-reported features in state-of-the-art deep learning malignancy/recurrence/treatment response prediction algorithms. Previous methods have performed such prediction tasks but without robust attribution to any clinically reported/actionable features (see extensive literature on the sensitivity of attribution methods to hyperparameters). This motivated us to curate datasets by annotating clinically-reported features at the voxel/vertex level on public datasets (using our published advanced mathematical algorithms) and relating these to prediction tasks (bypassing the “flaky” attribution schemes). With the release of these comprehensively-annotated datasets, we hope that previous malignancy prediction methods can also validate their explanations and provide clinically-actionable insights. We also provide strong end-to-end baselines for extracting these hard-to-compute clinically-reported features and using these in different prediction tasks. ...

A comprehensive framework for lung cancer screening radiomics using LIDC-IDRI and LUNGx dataset. Data preprocessing - download data, conversion, etc. Radiomics feature extraction including spiculation features AutoML model building and validation Source code https://github.com/choilab-jefferson/LungCancerScreeningRadiomics Publications Wookjin Choi, Jung Hun Oh, Sadegh Riyahi, Chia-Ju Liu, Feng Jiang, Wengen Chen, Charles White, Andreas Rimner, James G. Mechalakos, Joseph O. Deasy, and Wei Lu, “Radiomics analysis of pulmonary nodules in low-dose CT for early detection of lung cancer”, Medical Physics, Vol. 45, No. 4, pp. 1537-1549, April 2018. https://doi.org/10.1002/mp.12820 Wookjin Choi, Saad Nadeem, Sadegh Riyahi, Joseph O. Deasy, Allen Tannenbaum, Wei Lu, “Reproducible and Interpretable Spiculation Quantification for Lung Cancer Screening.” Computer methods and programs in biomedicine. 200 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmpb.2020.105839

Jung Hun Oh, Wookjin Choi, Euiseong Ko, Mingon Kang, Allen Tannenbaum, Joseph O Deasy The authors wish it to be known that, in their opinion, Jung Hun Oh and Wookjin Choi should be regarded as Joint First Authors. https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/37/Supplement_1/i443/6319702 https://github.com/mskspi/PathCNN/raw/main/img/pathcnn.png An illustration of biological interpretation. (A) Grad-CAM procedure to generate class activation maps. The two images on the left bottom represent an example of the class activation maps for a sample in the cohort, which were generated from Grad-CAM procedure; (B) statistical analysis to identify significantly different pathways between the LTS and non-LTS groups. LTS, long-term survival; CNN, convolutional neural network; ReLU, rectified linear unit ...

Darrin Gladman, Jehu Osegbe, Wookjin Choi*, and Joon Suk Lee “Automatic motion tracking system for analysis of insect behavior”, Proc. SPIE 11510, Applications of Digital Image Processing XLIII, 115102W (21 August 2020); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2568804 *Corresponding author Abstract We present a multi-object tracking system to track small insects such as ants and bees. Motion-based object tracking recognizes the movements of objects in videos using information extracted from the given video frames. We applied several computer vision techniques, such as blob detection and appearance matching, to track ants. Moreover, we discussed different object detection methodologies and investigated the various challenges of object detection, such as illumination variations and blob merge/split. The proposed system effectively tracked multiple objects in various environments. ...

Choi, W., Nadeem, S., Alam, S. R., Deasy, J. O., Tannenbaum, A., & Lu, W. (2020). Reproducible and Interpretable Spiculation Quantification for Lung Cancer Screening. Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine, 105839. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmpb.2020.105839 Source codes: https://github.com/choilab-jefferson/LungCancerScreeningRadiomics Highlights A novel interpretable spiculation feature is presented, computed using the area distortion metric from spherical conformal (angle-preserving) parameterization. A simple one-step feature and prediction model is introduced which only uses our interpretable features (size, spiculation, lobulation, vessel/wall attachment) and has the added advantage of using weak-labeled training data. ...

The 2020 Joint AAPM | COMP Virtual Meeting https://w3.aapm.org/meetings/2020AM/programInfo/programAbs.php?sid=8490&aid=52949