What is radiomics? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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If you are having medical imaging studies done you may soon hear of a new technique to assess those images called ‘radiomics.’ Elliot Fishman, a medical imaging expert at Johns Hopkins, explains.

Fishman: What radiomics is is a way of having the computer look at the images. It’s a complex pattern, we run lots of computer algorithms, to try to figure out can we pick up cancer or any abnormality earlier. We’ve been spending the last five years at Hopkins looking at early detection of pancreatic cancer. We’re creating fingerprints of the patient’s tumors. The fingerprint of the normal pancreas and the fingerprint of the cancer look different. When we did this we were able to pick up cancer with a 99% accuracy.  :33

Fishman says radiomics has the potential to transform assessment and diagnosis of many cancers to allow much more precise and individually tailored treatment. He notes that at some point it may also be useful for screening. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.