Radiomics for Head-and-Neck Cancer

Abstract

There are many types of head-and-neck cancers according to the occurrence site and histological type of cancer. Conventional head-and-neck cancer treatment employs a standard therapy (one-size-fits-all approach), in which a specific treatment approach is applied to all patients who have the same cancer without taking into the cancer traits of each patient. However, standard therapy was not effective for some patients. This is a big problem which should be solved. Recently, the cancer characterization using radiomics is getting attention. Radiomics is a novel research field that analyzes the relationships between the many phenotypic (image) features, which were extracted from multi-modality images such as computed tomography and magnetic resonance images, and clinical outcomes. Radiomics could contribute to the treatment decision making for head-and-neck cancers based on the analysis results. Therefore, radiomics may be a practical method of precision medicine in head-and-neck cancer treatment. I introduce some radiomics researches related to head-and-neck cancer in this report.