Impact of Radiomics Parameters and Clinical Integration on Prognostication in Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma: A Multicenter Study

Radiomics has the potential to improve risk stratification in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC), but clinical adoption is limited by inconsistent performance across institutions. A key source of variability is how radiomic features are generated, preprocessed, and selected prior to model development. This multicenter study evaluated how radiomics parameterization and feature selection strategies affect external model performance, feature stability, and time-to-event risk stratification. We studied pre-treatment CT scans from 752 patients with primary HNSCC from three hospitals. For each scan, 1648 radiomic features were computed using 20 different preparation methods that varied in scaling, outlier removal, and gray-level bin width. We compared five feature selection methods: Graph-FS with connected components, Boruta, Lasso, RFE-RF, and mRMR. The classification models used were Random Forest, XGBoost, CatBoost, and Logistic Regression. We measured performance using external ROC-AUC, bootstrap confidence intervals, Brier score, and RobustScore. Stability of feature selection was assessed using the Kuncheva and Jaccard indices. Cox proportional hazards models confirmed time-to-event results, and consensus SHAP analysis helped explain the models. Radiomics parameterization influenced model performance, and no single configuration was optimal across all analyses. Radiomics-only models outperformed clinical-only models, while clinical–radiomics models achieved the highest overall performance. mRMR and Lasso produced the highest average external AUCs, while Graph-FS showed the greatest stability. The best classification model achieved an external AUC of 0.817. In Cox validation, the best clinical–radiomics configuration achieved an external C-index of 0.662 and separated high- and low-risk patients in the external cohort.