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As the most lethal major cancer, pancreatic cancer is a global healthcare challenge. Personalized medicine utilizing cutting-edge multi-omics data holds potential for major breakthroughs in tackling this critical problem. Radiomics and deep learning, two trendy quantitative imaging methods that take advantage of data science and modern medical imaging, have shown increasing promise in advancing the precision management of pancreatic cancer via diagnosing of precursor diseases, early detection, accurate diagnosis, and treatment personalization and optimization. Radiomics employs manually-crafted features, while deep learning applies computer-generated automatic features. These two methods aim to mine hidden information in medical images that is missed by conventional radiology and gain insights by systematically comparing the quantitative image information across different patients in order to characterize unique imaging phenotypes. Both methods have been studied and applied in various pancreatic cancer clinical applications. In this review, we begin with an introduction to the clinical problems and the technology. After providing technical overviews of the two methods, this review focuses on the current progress of clinical applications in precancerous lesion diagnosis, pancreatic cancer detection and diagnosis, prognosis prediction, treatment stratification, and radiogenomics. The limitations of current studies and methods are discussed, along with future directions. With better standardization and optimization of the workflow from image acquisition to analysis and with larger and especially prospective high-quality datasets, radiomics and deep learning methods could show real hope in the battle against pancreatic cancer through big data-based high-precision personalization.
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This content will become publicly available on September 1, 2026
Robust Distance Correlation for Variable Screening
ABSTRACT In modern statistical applications, identifying critical features in high‐dimensional data is essential for scientific discoveries. Traditional best subset selection methods face computational challenges, while regularization approaches such as Lasso, SCAD and their variants often exhibit poor performance with ultrahigh‐dimensional data. Sure screening methods, widely used for dimensionality reduction, have been developed as popular alternatives, but few target heavy‐tailed characteristics in modern big data. This paper introduces a new sure screening method, based on robust distance correlation (‘RDC’), designed for heavy‐tailed data. The proposed method inherits the benefits of the original model‐free distance correlation‐based screening while robustly estimating distance correlation in the presence of heavy‐tailed data. We further develop an FDR control procedure by incorporating the Reflection via Data Splitting (REDS) method. Extensive simulations demonstrate the method's advantage over existing screening procedures under different scenarios of heavy‐tailedness. Its application to high‐dimensional heavy‐tailed RNA‐seq data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) pancreatic cancer cohort showcases superior performance in identifying biologically meaningful genes predictive of MAPK1 protein expression critical to pancreatic cancer.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2113568
- PAR ID:
- 10639891
- Publisher / Repository:
- John Wiley & Sons Ltd
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Stat
- Volume:
- 14
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 2049-1573
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- e70094
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- distance correlation false discovery rate Huber loss robustness sure screening property variable selection
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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