Radiogenomics: Hunting Down Liver Metastasis in Colorectal Cancer Patients

Abstract

Radiomics is a developing new discipline that analyzes conventional medical images to extract quantifiable data that can be mined for new biomarkers that show the biology of pathological processes at microscopic levels. These data can be converted into image-based signatures to improve diagnostic, prognostic and predictive accuracy in cancer patients. The combination of radiomics and molecular data, called radiogenomics, has clear implications for cancer patients' management. Though some studies have focused on radiogenomics signatures in hepatocellular carcinoma patients, only a few have examined colorectal cancer metastatic lesions in the liver. Moreover, the need to differentiate between liver lesions is fundamental for accurate diagnosis and treatment. In this review, we summarize the knowledge gained from radiomics and radiogenomics studies in hepatic metastatic colorectal cancer patients and their use in early diagnosis, response assessment and treatment decisions. We also investigate their value as possible prognostic biomarkers. In addition, the great potential of image mining to provide a comprehensive view of liver niche formation is examined thoroughly. Finally, new challenges and current limitations for the early detection of the liver premetastatic niche, based on radiomics and radiogenomics, are also discussed.

Keywords: colon cancer; early detection; liver metastasis; metastatic niche; radiogenomics; radiomics.

Figure 1

Hunting down liver metastasis in colorectal cancer patients by radiogenomics. The figure shows a comprehensive view of metastatic niche formation phases. Reasonably, the different phases of metastatic niche formation (each one represented by a puzzle piece in the figure) could be detected by radiogenomics approaches in the near future. The references included in the figure show related manuscript with information about tumor cell extravasation [34,35], neoangiogenesis [34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47], immunosurveillance evasion [44,47,48,49,50,51,52,53] and tumor growth [41] that could be theoretically translated to metastatic niche detection. Created with BioRender.com.