4 - Radiomics in head and neck cancer

Abstract

Head and neck cancer has great regional anatomical complexity, as it can develop in different structures, exhibiting diverse tumor manifestations and high intratumoral heterogeneity, which is highly related to resistance to treatment, progression, the appearance of metastasis and tumor recurrences. Radiomics has the potential to address these obstacles by extracting quantitative, measurable, and extractable features from the region of interest of medical images. It provides valuable information about the tumor, associating this data with biological parameters helping clinical decision-making, improving diagnosis, prognosis and predictive accuracy and enabling personalized therapy and response assessment. In this work, an overview of head and neck cancer is introduced, identifying the most relevant aspects. It also clarifies the concept of radiomics: the origin, workflow, and categories of radiomic features. Finally, some studies on the use of radiomics in head and neck cancer are presented.