Impact of the EARL harmonization program on automatic delineation of metabolic active tumour volumes (MATVs).

This study demonstrates that automatic contouring of lung tumours on EARL-compliant PSF images using the widely adopted automatic isocontour methodology is an accurate means of overcoming reconstruction variability in MATV delineation. Although gradient-based methodology appears to be less sensitive to reconstruction variability, the use of EARL-compliant PSF images significantly improved the Dice coefficients and concordance indices, demonstrating the importance of harmonised-images, even when more advanced contouring algorithms are used.