Research progress of radiomics and its application in clinical of colorectal cancer

Medical images contain a great deal of information that cannot be recognized by the human eye. It may not only fully express the heterogeneity of the tumor, but also reflect important information such as prognosis information of patients. In recent years, with the development of image processing and artificial intelligence technology, the application of medical image big data analysis method to assist doctors to make decisions or to solve the thorny problems in clinical practice has become a research hotspot. This emerging field is called "radiomics". On the other hand, colorectal cancer is one of the most common and fatal cancer species in China. The number of patients and deaths has increased year by year. There are many hot research questions in the three different stages of preoperative, intraoperative and postoperative. In this paper, we introduced the basic principle and technology of the radiomics. Taking the research of radiomics in colorectal cancer as an example, the following different clinical questions of each stage, including diagnose the status of pathological complete remission after neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy, the decision of operation plan and the survival analysis after operation, were introduced respectively.