Challenges and caveats of a multi-center retrospective radiomics study: an example of early treatment response assessment for NSCLC patients using FDG-PET/CT radiomics.

The results imply that the study might have been influenced by a limited sample size, heterogeneous patient characteristics, and inconsistent imaging parameters. No prognostic performance of FDG-PET or CT based radiomics models can be reported. This study highlights the necessity of extensive evaluations of cohorts and of validation datasets, especially in retrospective multi-centric datasets.