Radiomic nomograms in CT diagnosis of gall bladder carcinoma: a narrative review

Radiomics is a method that extracts many features from medical images using various algorithms. Medical nomograms are graphical representations of statistical predictive models that produce a likelihood of a clinical event for a specific individual based on biological and clinical data. The radiomic nomogram was first introduced in 2016 to study the integration of specific radiomic characteristics with clinically significant risk factors for patients with colorectal cancer lymph node metastases. Thereby it gained momentum and made its way into different domains of breast, liver, and head and neck cancer. Deep learning-based radiomics which automatically generates and extracts significant features from the input data using various neural network architectures, along with the generation and usage of nomograms are the latest developments in the application of radiomics for the diagnosis of gall bladder carcinoma. Although radiomics has demonstrated encouraging outcomes in the diagnosis of gall bladder carcinoma, but most of the studies conducted suffer from a lack of external validation cohorts, smaller sample sizes, and paucity of prospective utility in routine clinical settings.