infonet-economy

Recent papers in the field of radiomics showed strong evidence that novel image biomarkers based on structural tissue properties have the potential to complement and even surpass invasive and costly biopsy-based molecular assays in certain clinical contexts. To date, very few translations of these research results to clinical practive have been carried out. In addition, a majority of the identified imaging biomarkers are perceived as black boxes by end-users, hindering their acceptance in clinical and research environments. We present a suite of plugins called Quantitative Feature Explore (QFExplore) for the open-access cloud-based ePAD platform enabling the exploration and validation of new imaging biomarkers in a clinical environment. The latter include the extraction, visualization and comparison of intensity- and texture-based quantitative imaging features, regional division of regions of interest to reveal tissue diversity, as well as the construction, use and sharing of user-personalized statistical machine learning models. No software installation is required and the platform can be accessed through any web browser. The relevance of the developed tools is demonstrated in the context of various clinical use-cases. The software is available online.