Role of advanced imaging techniques in the evaluation of oncological therapies in patients with colorectal liver metastases

Figure 1 Contrast enhanced computed tomography images from a patient with colon cancer. A: Baseline computed tomography (CT) demonstrates the presence of multiple liver metastases; B: After four cycles of combined chemotherapy (folinic acid + fluorouracil + irinotecan + cetuximab) the CT scan shows a reduction in both size and number of liver metastases, which was classified as a partial response with Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumours criteria; C and D: The partial response was then confirmed after (C) 8 and (D) 12 chemotherapy cycles.

Figure 2 Schematic diagram showing how radiomics features can be extracted from medical images using a diffusion-weighted imaging image from an magnetic resonance imaging scan of a patient with colorectal liver metastasis as an example. The process begins on the left upper corner with image acquisition, followed by lesion segmentation on a dedicated software leading to a region of interest. The shape of the region of interest as well as the distribution and spatial relation of intensity values of each pixel are computationally analysed to extract radiomics features of different order.