Pulmonary tuberculosis diagnosis, differentiation and disease management: A review of radiomics applications

Pulmonary tuberculosis is a worldwide epidemic that can only be fought effectively with early and accurate diagnosis and proper disease management. The means of diagnosis and disease management should be easily accessible, cost effective and be readily available in the high tuberculosis burdened countries where it is most needed. Fortunately, the fast development of computer science in recent years has ensured that medical images can accurately be quantified. Radiomics is one such tool that can be used to quantify medical images. This review article focuses on the literature currently available on the application of radiomics explicitly for the purpose of diagnosis, differentiation from other pulmonary diseases and disease management of pulmonary tuberculosis. Despite using a formal search strategy, only five articles could be found on the application of radiomics to pulmonary tuberculosis. In all five articles reviewed, radiomic feature extraction was successfully used to quantify digital medical images for the purpose of comparing, or differentiating, pulmonary tuberculosis from other pulmonary diseases. This demonstrates that the use of radiomics for the purpose of tuberculosis disease management and diagnosis remains a valuable data mining opportunity not yet realised.