Radiomics: A primer for the radiation oncologist

Radiomics are a set of methods used to leverage medical imaging and extract quantitative features that can characterize a patient's phenotype. All modalities can be used with several different software packages. Specific informatics methods can then be used to create meaningful predictive models. In this review, we will explain the major steps of a radiomics analysis pipeline and then present the studies published in the context of radiation therapy.

A literature review was performed on Medline using the search engine PubMed. The search strategy included the search terms "radiotherapy", "radiation oncology" and "radiomics". The search was conducted in July 2019 and reference lists of selected articles were hand searched for relevance to this review.

A typical radiomics workflow always includes five steps: imaging and segmenting, data curation and preparation, feature extraction, exploration and selection and finally modeling. In radiation oncology, radiomics studies have been published to explore different clinical outcome in lung (n=5), head and neck (n=5), esophageal (n=3), rectal (n=3), pancreatic (n=2) cancer and brain metastases (n=2). The quality of these retrospective studies is heterogeneous and their results have not been translated to the clinic.

Radiomics has a great potential to predict clinical outcome and better personalize treatment. But the field is still young and constantly evolving. Improvement in bias reduction techniques and multicenter studies will hopefully allow more robust and generalizable models.