Three UCSF Radiology Researchers to Present Their Research at ISMRM 2023
Three UCSF Radiology researchers have received Surbeck Travel Awards to present their research at the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) annual meeting. The recipients — Matthew Gibbons, PhD, Céline Taglang, PhD, and Pierre Nedelec — will travel to Toronto for the conference taking place June 3-8, 2023.
Each Surbeck Travel Award recipient will give an oral presentation at ISMRM. Here are the topics:
Matthew Gibbons, PhD, a specialist, is presenting research titled “Quantitative and Automated MRI Cancer Risk Maps used for Identification of Prostate Cancer Progression.” The study’s objective was to determine whether automated mpMRI cancer risk maps could identify prostate cancer (PCa) progression. The team used derived lesion masks to analyze factors for progression. A decision tree model was then generated with sensitivity = 0.81 and specificity = 0.75. According to Gibbons, these results indicate the potential of PCa risk maps in identifying progression during PCa active surveillance to assist in treatment decisions. The principal investigator for this research is Susan Noworolski, PhD, UCSF Radiology professor and MSBI Director of Graduate Studies.
Céline Taglang, PhD, an associate specialist, is presenting research titled “Imaging Choline Phospholipid Biosynthesis in Gliomas using Deuterium Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy.” Her study identifies a novel agent, deuterium-labeled choline, for metabolic imaging of gliomas and their response to therapy. Its clinical translation has the potential to improve response assessment in glioma patients. Taglang joined the Cancer Metabolic Imaging & Therapy Lab in 2020 where she works to enhance 13C labeling and hyperpolarization of biocompatible agents for MRI as well as develop deuterium magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging to better reveal metabolism in the brain of animal models. The principal investigator for this research is Pavithra Viswanath, PhD, an associate professor at UCSF Radiology.
Pierre Nedelec, MS, a computational data scientist, is presenting research on the reliability of tractography pipelines evaluated on a large longitudinal dataset. Tractography, the process to reconstitute white matter fibers from diffusion imaging (MRI), is used by researchers and clinicians alike to further our understanding of how the brain works or to guide surgical procedures. However, widespread adoption of this approach has been limited by uncertainty about the optimal methodology to produce robust reproducible results. Using a large neuroimaging dataset, the ABCD Study, Nedelec and colleagues compare the current main available methods and offer a way to automatically assess reproducibility in a longitudinal dataset. The principal investigators are UCSF Radiology’s Andreas Rauschecker, MD, PhD, and Leo Sugrue, MD, PhD of the RSL Lab.
UCSF Radiology & Biomedical Imaging Surbeck travel awards are made in the memory of Sarah J. Nelson, PhD, an acclaimed UCSF Radiology research scientist and faculty member who passed away in 2019. The Surbeck travel awards provide support to non-faculty academics conducting research in imaging science who are traveling to a meeting for an invited presentation.
Congratulations to these researchers on their upcoming ISMRM research presentations.