Finding integrated imaging biomarker for cancer
AI-based Radio-Patho-Genomics for Precision Medicine
- Biomarkers as major prognostic factors such as immuno-chemotherapy were generally identified from genome or pathological results, but recent studies to find prognostic biomarkers within medical images (MR/CT, PET, etc.) are ongoing.
- The advantages of medical image analysis are as follows:
- Cross-sectional analysis is possible, not sampling-based analysis
- Intra/peri-tumoral analysis is possible extensively
- It contains objective information based on specific physical quantities. (Example: electron density in CT)
- Analysis using medical images enables extracting information on the entire tumor area in a cross-sectional way which provides an opportunity to quantitatively evaluate tumor heterogeneity, one of the main characteristics of malignant tumors.
- The radiomic feature that analyzes the texture of the tumor defines intra-tumor heterogeneity by quantifying the image pattern based on the spatial relationship between pixels of a specific intensity or co-occurrence of pixel values.
- This makes it possible to derive and quantify an imaging phenotype close to a specific disease phenotype.
- Thus, It is expected that more detailed patient risk stratification will be possible through multi-omics analysis incorporating biomarkers of each level.