Radiomics and its advances in hepatocellular carcinoma

Liver cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide, so early detection and prediction for response to treatment is of great benefit to hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients. Currently, needle biopsy and conventional medical imaging play a significant and basic role in HCC patients' management, while those two approaches are limited in sample error and observer-dependence. Radiomics can make up for this deficiency because it is an emerging non-invasive technic that is capable of getting comprehensive information relevant to tumor situation across spatial-temporal limitation. The basic procedure for radiomics includes image acquisition, region of interest segmentation and reconstruction, feature extraction, selection and classification, and model building and performance evaluation. The current advances and potential prospect of radiomics in HCC studies are involved in diagnosis, prediction for response to treatment, prognosis evaluation and radiogenomics.