Radiomics for the radiologist: opportunities and challenges

Radiomics is a growing field where hundreds or thousands of quantitative features are extracted from a contoured region in a medical image in order to describe the image properties of a lesion or tissue. The radiomic features are then used for building an artificial intelligence-based model that can perform a diagnosis or characterization of tissues and organs. In this article we have defined the field of radiomics, its workflow and tools and describe some of the results achieved in studies applying radiomics. We also want to discuss its main limitations and strengths, in particular when compared with other artificial intelligence technique applied to imaging.