Role of Complex Networks for Integrating Medical Images and Radiomic Features of Intracranial Ependymoma Patients in Response to Proton Radiotherapy (Frontiers in Medicine)

Human cancers exhibit phenotypic diversity that medical imaging can precisely and non-invasively detect. Multiple factors underlying innovations and progresses in the medical imaging field exert diagnostic and therapeutic impacts. The emerging field of radiomics has shown unprecedented ability to use imaging information in guiding clinical decisions. To achieve clinical assessment that exploits radiomic knowledge sources, integration between diverse data types is required. A current gap is the accuracy with which radiomics aligns with clinical endpoints. We propose a novel methodological approach that synergizes data volumes (images), tissue-contextualized information breadth, and network-driven resolution depth. Following the Precision Medicine paradigm, disease monitoring and prognostic assessment are tackled at the individual level by examining medical images acquired from two patients affected by intracranial ependymoma (with and without relapse). The challenge of spatially characterizing intratumor heterogeneity is tackled by a network approach that presents two main advantages: (a) Increased detection in the image domain power from high spatial resolution, (b) Superior accuracy in generating hypotheses underlying clinical decisions.