Potential Application of Radiomics for Differentiating Solitary Pulmonary Nodules

A solitary pulmonary nodule is defined as radiographic lesion with diameters no more than 3 cm and completely surrounded by normal lung tissue. It is commonly encountered in clinical practice and its diagnosis is a big challenge. Medical imaging, as a non-invasive approach, plays a crucial role in the diagnosis of solitary pulmonary nodules since the potential morbidity of surgery and the limits of biopsy. Advanced hardware, image acquisition and analysis technologies have led to the utilization of imaging towards quantitative imaging. With the aim of mining more useful information from image data, radiomics with high-throughput extraction can play a useful role. This article is to introduce the current state of radiomics studies and describe the general procedures. Another objective of this paper is to discover the feasibility and potential of radiomics methods on differentiating solitary pulmonary nodules and to look into the future direction of radiomics in this area.