Towards guidelines to harmonize textural features in PET: Haralick textural features vary with image noise, but exposure-invariant domains enable comparable PET radiomics.

Purpose: Image texture is increasingly used to discriminate tissues and lesions in PET/CT. For quantification or in computer-aided diagnosis, textural feature analysis must produce robust and comparable values. Because statistical feature values depend on image count statistics, we investigated in depth the stability of Haralick features values as functions of acquisition duration, and for common image resolutions and reconstructions.