Radiomics for rectal cancer

Diagnosis and treatment of locally advanced rectal cancer is mainly based on multimodal approach for staging, planning and treatment. The modern radiological and imaging techniques offer, day after day, the possibility to characterize tumor lesions in a more precise and prognostically valuable way. In rectal cancer, extending often the characterization to colon cancer, literature offers some evidences that quantitative and “radiomics” analysis of tumor images might improve the prognostic evaluation of the tumor and the patients’ characterization. Unfortunately, as in other fields of radiomics, the rise of new evidence and models based on single institution case series don’t offer the practical chance to apply them universal data set. Greater efforts in the direction of model evaluation and validation, above all using an external validation approach, are expected to be shown in the coming years for validation of methodology.