Author response to Cunha et al

Rivka R Colen; Christian Rolfo; Murat Ak; Mira Ayoub; Sara Ahmed; Nabil Elshafeey; Priyadarshini Mamindla; Pascal O Zinn; Chaan Ng; Raghu Vikram; Spyridon Bakas; Christine B Peterson; Jordi Rodon Ahnert; Vivek Subbiah; Daniel D Karp; Bettzy Stephen; Joud Hajjar; Aung Naing

doi:10.1136/jitc-2021-003299

Author response to Cunha et al

J Immunother Cancer. 2021 Jul;9(7):e003299. doi: 10.1136/jitc-2021-003299.

Authors

Rivka R Colen^{1

2}, Christian Rolfo³, Murat Ak^{4

2}, Mira Ayoub^{4

2}, Sara Ahmed⁵, Nabil Elshafeey⁶, Priyadarshini Mamindla², Pascal O Zinn⁷, Chaan Ng⁸, Raghu Vikram⁸, Spyridon Bakas⁹, Christine B Peterson¹⁰, Jordi Rodon Ahnert¹¹, Vivek Subbiah¹¹, Daniel D Karp¹¹, Bettzy Stephen¹¹, Joud Hajjar^{12

13}, Aung Naing¹⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Radiology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA anaing@mdanderson.org colenrr@upmc.edu.
² Department of Radiology, Hillman Cancer Center, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.
³ Center for Thoracic Oncology at Tisch Cancer Institute, Mount Sinai Health System & Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, New York, USA.
⁴ Department of Radiology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.
⁵ Department of Radiation Oncology, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas, USA.
⁶ Department of Breast Imaging, Diagnostic Radiology, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas, USA.
⁷ Department of Neurosurgery, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.
⁸ Abdominal Imaging Department, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas, USA.
⁹ Department of Radiology, Pathology, and Laboratory Medicine, University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
¹⁰ Department of Biostatistics, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas, USA.
¹¹ Investigational Cancer Therapeutics, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas, USA.
¹² William T Shearer Center for Human Immunobiology, Texas Children's Hospital, Houston, Texas, USA.
¹³ Section of Immunology, Allergy and Retrovirology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, USA.
¹⁴ Investigational Cancer Therapeutics, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas, USA anaing@mdanderson.org colenrr@upmc.edu.

Abstract

The need to identify biomarkers to predict immunotherapy response for rare cancers has been long overdue. We aimed to study this in our paper, 'Radiomics analysis for predicting pembrolizumab response in patients with advanced rare cancers'. In this response to the Letter to the Editor by Cunha et al, we explain and discuss the reasons behind choosing LASSO (Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator) and XGBoost (eXtreme Gradient Boosting) with LOOCV (Leave-One-Out Cross-Validation) as the feature selection and classifier method, respectively for our radiomics models. Also, we highlight what care was taken to avoid any overfitting on the models. Further, we checked for the multicollinearity of the features. Additionally, we performed 10-fold cross-validation instead of LOOCV to see the predictive performance of our radiomics models.

Keywords: immunotherapy.

Publication types

Editorial
Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Comment

MeSH terms

Humans
Retrospective Studies*

Abstract

Publication types

MeSH terms

Grants and funding