Many professionals in healthcare information technology might not yet be familiar with radiomics, but the emerging technology could potentially have a big impact on the future of cancer care. Radiomics might be most easily explained as "imaging analytics." The technology uses AI and machine learning to extract high-dimensional data from standard medical images such as CT, MRI and PET scans to provide more than 1,500 data points that deliver new insights about the tumors or lesions in those images that cannot be obtained via traditional approaches. Healthcare IT News asked Rose Higgins, CEO of radiomics pioneer HealthMyne, for a primer on radiomics, and to discuss its place in the realm of health IT. Q: Please explain what radiomics is, and how it works.

"With this partnership, we have the opportunity to leverage the technical expertise of one of the largest providers of medical technology globally and the clinical and research expertise of UCSF, one of the largest recipients of National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding, in order to make the promise of precision healthcare a reality," said Michael Blum, MD, associate vice chancellor for informatics, director of CDHI, and professor of medicine at UCSF.

Since the early days of the current Big Data and Data Science movements, many data scientists have been devoted to applications of those data collections and advanced algorithms to solving societal problems. Subsequently, informal groups (e.g., meetups) and entire organizations have coalesced around particular approaches (e.g., data hackathons; and online competitions), or particular societal needs (e.g., DataKind.org; The range and depth of those applications have a tremendous reach: from human health to ocean health, from pet shelters to sheltering persons in need, from healthy lifestyle change to climate change, from smart cities to smart farms, from precision law enforcement to precision medicine, from improving commuter traffic to stopping human trafficking. The world is data now. Data are the new asset to fuel insightful discoveries, smarter decisions, essential innovations, and better outcomes.