TU‐G‐303‐01: Radiomics: Quantitative Imaging in the Service of Improved Treatment Decision Making

Abstract

‘Radiomics’ refers to studies that extract a large amount of quantitative information from medical imaging studies as a basis for characterizing a specific aspect of patient health. Radiomics models can be built to address a wide range of outcome predictions, clinical decisions, basic cancer biology, etc. For example, radiomics models can be built to predict the aggressiveness of an imaged cancer, cancer gene expression characteristics (radiogenomics), radiation therapy treatment response, etc. Technically, radiomics brings together quantitative imaging, computer vision/image processing, and machine learning. In this symposium, speakers will discuss approaches to radiomics investigations, including: longitudinal radiomics, radiomics combined with other biomarkers (‘pan‐omics’), radiomics for various imaging modalities (CT, MRI, and PET), and the use of registered multi‐modality imaging datasets as a basis for radiomics. There are many challenges to the eventual use of radiomics‐derived methods in clinical practice, including: standardization and robustness of selected metrics, accruing the data required, building and validating the resulting models, registering longitudinal data that often involve significant patient changes, reliable automated cancer segmentation tools, etc. Despite the hurdles, results achieved so far indicate the tremendous potential of this general approach to quantifying and using data from medical images. Specific applications of radiomics to be presented in this symposium will include: the longitudinal analysis of patients with low‐grade gliomas; automatic detection and assessment of patients with metastatic bone lesions; image‐based monitoring of patients with growing lymph nodes; predicting radiotherapy outcomes using multi‐modality radiomics; and studies relating radiomics with genomics in lung cancer and glioblastoma.Learning Objectives: Understanding the basic image features that are often used in radiomic models. Understanding requirements for reliable radiomic models, including robustness of metrics, adequate predictive accuracy, and generalizability. Understanding the methodology behind radiomic‐genomic (‘radiogenomics’) correlations. Research supported by NIH (US), CIHR (Canada), and NSERC (Canada)