{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,30]],"date-time":"2026-07-30T15:39:26Z","timestamp":1785425966237,"version":"3.56.0"},"reference-count":44,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"14","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,16]],"date-time":"2026-07-16T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1784160000000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"name":"Austrian Science Fund","award":["10.55776\/DOC110"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["10.55776\/DOC110"]}]},{"award":["10.55776\/DOC110"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["10.55776\/DOC110"]}],"id":[{"id":"https:\/\/ror.org\/013tf3c58","id-type":"ROR","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Cancers"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Background: Distinguishing vital from non-vital persistent cervical lymph nodes after chemoradiotherapy in HNSCC remains clinically challenging. We investigated whether image-level data augmentation improves CT-based radiomics classification for this task. Methods: We evaluated eight augmentation strategies and their 28 pairwise combinations in 55 patients, using Bayesian hyperparameter tuning with Optuna for parameter optimization. A radiomics pipeline comprising Radiomics features, five feature selectors, and seven classifiers was assessed using patient-level stratified 5-fold cross-validation. Configurations were ranked using a composite score defined as the mean of AUC, ACC and F1-score. Results: Feature selection improved the composite score from 0.659 to 0.742. The best augmented configuration, Window Contrast Variation, achieved a composite score of 0.803 and an AUC of 0.831, corresponding to an 8.2% relative point-estimate gain over feature selection alone and a 21.9% gain over the no-selection baseline when feature selection and augmentation were combined. Conclusions: These findings suggest that feature selection with optimized augmentation may enhance radiomics-based lymph node classification. However, individual augmentation-versus-baseline differences did not reach statistical significance in this limited sample, requiring confirmation in larger cohorts.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/cancers18142293","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,17]],"date-time":"2026-07-17T00:55:59Z","timestamp":1784249759000},"page":"2293","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Image-Level Data Augmentation for Radiomics-Based Classification of Vital Versus Non-Vital Persistent Cervical Lymph Nodes After Chemoradiotherapy in HNSCC"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"18","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0004-2787-0281","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Sara","family":"Naccour","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Otorhinolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Medical University of Innsbruck, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-1561-8992","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Assaad","family":"Moawad","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Datathings, 5, Rue de L\u2019Industrie, L-1811 Luxembourg, Luxembourg"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0001-1413-7396","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Matthias","family":"Santer","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Otorhinolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Medical University of Innsbruck, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-9176-7415","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Daniel","family":"Dejaco","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Otorhinolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Medical University of Innsbruck, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-7255-0672","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Gerlig","family":"Widmann","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"University Hospital of Radiology, Medical University of Innsbruck, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-0732-4919","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Siegfried","family":"Kollotzek","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"University Hospital of Radio-Oncology, Medical University of Innsbruck, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-2833-3224","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Wolfgang","family":"Freysinger","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Otorhinolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Medical University of Innsbruck, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,16]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","first-page":"229","article-title":"Global cancer statistics 2022: GLOBOCAN estimates of incidence and mortality worldwide for 36 cancers in 185 countries","volume":"74","author":"Bray","year":"2024","journal-title":"CA Cancer J. 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