Introduction: Radiomics [1] has been a very active field of research during the last five years. There have been very promising results in CT, MRI and PET/CT image modalities. There are, however, also numerous issues and limitations that have been identified.

Methods: This talk will review the currently available results of radiomics with a focus on PET/CT imaging, and highlights the identified limitations, issues and potential solutions for the future [2,3].

Results: Numerous encouraging results regarding PET/CT radiomics have been published in various types of tumors. However, major limitations include (but are not limited to) statistical power of the studies, lack of methodological standardization, and complexity of the workflow.

Conclusions: Although radiomics is a fast evolving field of research and encouraging results have been published, caution is required and in order to ensure the future of radiomics, efforts should be focused on methodological standardization, large prospective validation studies, and automatization/simplification of the analysis workflow.

References:

[1] Lambin P, et al. Radiomics: extracting more information from medical images using advanced feature analysis. Eur J Cancer. 2012

[2] Hatt M, et al. Radiomics in PET/CT: More Than Meets the Eye? J Nucl Med. 2017

[3] Hatt M, et al. Characterization of PET/CT images using texture analysis: the past, the present... any future? Eur J Nucl Med Mol Imaging. 2017