Radiomics is a field that extracts quantitative features from medical imaging to enhance diagnostic accuracy and personalise treatment strategies. By integrating imaging data with genomic information, radiomics significantly improves patient outcomes.
FREMONT, CA: Radiomics is an emerging field that focuses on extracting quantitative features from medical imaging data, particularly radiological images like CT, MRI, and PET scans. By transforming visual data into high-dimensional information, radiomics enables a deeper analysis of tumour characteristics and disease processes, contributing significantly to precision medicine.
How Radiomics Works
The radiometric process consists of several key steps:
Image Acquisition: The initial step in radiomics is to produce high-quality images of tissues and organs using imaging modalities such as CT, MRI, and PET. The choice of modality depends on the clinical application and the specific anatomical area. High-resolution images are essential for accurately depicting tumour characteristics. Effective acquisition ensures that the data is reliable for subsequent analysis, which is crucial for radiomic studies' success.
Image Preprocessing: This involves enhancing the quality of acquired images to reduce noise and artefacts. This step standardises imaging protocols to scan consistency and normalises intensity values for uniformity. Artifact correction addresses distortions from patient movement or technical issues during capture. Proper preprocessing is vital for obtaining reliable and reproducible features that enhance data quality, setting the stage for accurate radiometric analysis.
Feature Extraction: Quantifies characteristics from preprocessed images, transforming visual data into measurable parameters. This stage is essential for capturing various features, including first-order statistics describing pixel intensity distributions. Shape features reflect structures' geometrical properties, such as volume and surface area. Texture features analyse spatial arrangements and patterns of pixels, revealing insights into tissue heterogeneity.
Advanced algorithms and software tools, often powered by machine learning and AI, facilitate this extraction process, identifying patterns and correlations that may not be evident to the human eye.
Benefits of Radiomics
Enhanced Diagnostic Accuracy: Radiomics enhances diagnostic accuracy by providing a detailed understanding of tumour biology, allowing better differentiation between benign and malignant lesions. This capability facilitates earlier detection of cancers.
