Quantitative Issues in Cancer Research Working Seminar

Hugo Aerts, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Radiation Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

“Artificial Intelligence in Cancer Imaging”

ABSTRACT: Medical imaging in oncology has traditionally been restricted to the diagnosis and staging of cancer. But technological advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are moving imaging modalities into the heart of patient care. Imaging can address a critical barrier in precision medicine as solid tumors can be spatial and temporal heterogeneous, and the standard approach to tumor sampling, often invasive needle biopsy, is unable to fully capture the spatial state of the tumor. Radiomics refers to the automatic quantification of this radiographic phenotype. Radiomic methods heavily rely on AI technologies, in specific engineered and deep-learning algorithms, to quantify phenotypic characteristics that can be used to develop non-invasive biomarkers. In this talk, Dr. Aerts will discuss recent developments from his group and collaborators performing research at the intersection of radiology, bioinformatics, and data science. Also, he will discuss recent work of building a computational image analysis system to extract a rich radiomics set and use these features to build radiomic signatures. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of future work on building integrative systems incorporating both molecular and phenotypic data to improve cancer therapies.