“In the future, we envision that all medical images will be converted to mineable data with the process of radiomics as part of standard of care,” Dr. Gillies said in an interview. “Such data have already shown promise to increase the precision and accuracy of diagnostic images, and hence, will increasingly be used in therapy decision support.”
Among the many challenges that first need to be resolved are that images are often captured with settings and filters that can be different even within a single institution. The inconsistency adds noise to the data that are extracted by computers.
“Hence, the most robust data we have today are generated by radiologists themselves, although this has its own challenges of being time-consuming with inter-reader variability,” Dr. Gillies noted.
Another major challenge is sharing of the image data. Right now, radiomics is practiced at only a few research hospitals and thus, building large cohort studies requires that the images be moved across site. In the future, the researchers anticipate that software can be deployed across sites to enable radiomic feature extraction, which would mean that only the extracted data will have to be shared, he said.