Artificial intelligence and radiomics in pediatric molecular imaging

In the past decade, a new approach for quantitative analysis of medical images and prognostic modelling has emerged. Defined as the extraction and analysis of a large number of quantitative parameters from medical images, radiomics is an evolving field in precision medicine with the ultimate goal of the discovery of new imaging biomarkers for disease. Radiomics has already shown promising results in extracting diagnostic, prognostic, and molecular information latent in medical images. After acquisition of the medical images as part of the standard of care, a region of interest is defined often via a manual or semi-automatic approach. An algorithm then extracts and computes quantitative radiomics parameters from the region of interest. Whereas radiomics captures quantitative values of shape and texture based on predefined mathematical terms, neural networks have recently been used to directly learn and identify predictive features from medical images. Thereby, neural networks largely forego the need for so called "hand-engineered" features, which appears to result in significantly improved performance and reliability. Opportunities for radiomics and neural networks in pediatric nuclear medicine/radiology/molecular imaging are broad and can be thought of in three categories: automating well-defined administrative or clinical tasks, augmenting broader administrative or clinical tasks, and unlocking new methods of generating value. Specific applications include intelligent order sets, automated protocoling, improved image acquisition, computer aided triage and detection of abnormalities, next generation voice dictation systems, biomarker development, and therapy planning.