Abstract
Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is a malignant tumor of the head and neck. The primary clinical manifestations are nasal congestion, blood-stained nasal discharge, headache, and hearing loss. It occurs frequently in Southeast Asia, North Africa, and especially in southern China. Radiotherapy is the main treatment, and currently, imaging examinations used for the diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of NPC include computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET)-CT, and PET-MRI. These methods play an important role in target delineation, radiotherapy planning design, dose evaluation, and outcome prediction. However, the anatomical and metabolic information obtained at the macro level of images may not meet the increasing accuracy required for radiotherapy. As a technology used for mining deep image information, radiomics can provide further information for the diagnosis and treatment of NPC and promote individualized precision radiotherapy in the future. This paper reviews the application of radiomics in the diagnosis and treatment of nasopharyngeal carcinoma.
Highlights
Compared with other head and neck tumors, Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) has unique epidemiological, etiological, clinical, and genetic characteristics [1]
The features which are extracted from the volume of interest and related clinical parameters are filtered through various ways, such as Cox proportional hazards model and classifier, and the final required model is established [22]
Most imaging studies on NPC have focused on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data, and few have reported on the use of computed tomography (CT), positron emission tomography (PET)-CT, and PET-MRI images
Summary
Compared with other head and neck tumors, NPC has unique epidemiological, etiological, clinical, and genetic characteristics [1]. In contrast to anatomical imaging, PETCT combines biological metabolic information, and PET-MRI combines metabolic information with high-resolution soft-tissue images, and they are expected to become new methods for the diagnosis and treatment of NPC [5,6,7]. These imaging methods have played a crucial role in target delineation, planning, quantitative evaluation, radiotherapy response tracking, and outcome and toxicity prediction of NPCs [8,9,10,11]. One study applied metabolic information obtained from PET-CT to the treatment of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma with the aim of performing dose painting [17]
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