Radiomics: an Introductory Guide to What It May Foretell

Purpose of ReviewTo briefly review the radiomics concept, its applications, and challenges in oncology in the era of precision medicine.Recent FindingsOver the last 5years, more than 500 studies have evaluated the role of radiomics to predict tumor diagnosis, genetic pattern, tumor response to therapy, and survival in multiple cancers. This new post-processing method is aimed at extracting multiple quantitative features from the image and converting them into mineable data.SummaryRadiomics models developed have shown promising results and may play a role in the near future in the daily patient management especially to assess tumor heterogeneity acting as a whole tumor virtual biopsy. For now, radiomics is limited by its lack of standardization; future challenges will be to provide robust and reproducible metrics extracted from large multicenter databases.