Research

Orlando Health Cancer Institute. Proton Therapy Department

(August 2019 - present)


Advisor: Dr. Naren Ramakrishna, M.D., Ph.D.

Project: Modeling and visualization of brain tumor response to treatment

Project Aim: To develop a comprehensive model of brain tumor response to treatment and effective data visualizations for treatment outcomes assessment and clinical decision-support

My Contribution:

  • Conducted and wrote a literature review on response assessment of brain metastases where I identified the drawbacks of existing assessment methods and underscored the main research challenges

  • Developed Python scripts to automatically assess brain metastases’ response to stereotactic radiosurgery based on RANO-BM, RECIST 1.1, and other criteria

  • Developed Python scripts producing interactive timeline visualizations of post-treatment outcomes allowing for superposition of multiple response assessment methods and display of patient subsets

  • Presented a comparison of response assessment and data visualization methods for characterization of time-dependent outcomes following radiosurgery for brain metastases on 2020 SNO Annual Meeting

  • Contributed to building a dataset containing clinical data, treatment-specific details, and treatment outcomes of breast cancer patients with brain metastases who underwent stereotactic radiosurgery and intensity-modulated radiation therapy:

      • Collected information on corticosteroid usage, Karnofsky performance status, and brain specific symptoms

      • Performed MRI brain tumor measurements

      • Recorded various radiographic features including the presence and extend of leptomeningeal disease, pachymeningeal disease, hemorrhage, abscess, radiation necrosis, distant brain failure, resection cavity recurrence, and others

  • Developed Python scripts performing RANO-BM assessment of brain metastases' response to radiotherapy allowing to explore the impact of measurable disease threshold size and various ways of managing newly appeared brain lesions on response categories

  • Developed R scripts producing effective static data visualizations of brain metastases response assessment outcomes and their statistical analysis

  • Contributed to a journal paper as the first author which is expected to be submitted for publication by the end of 2021

SNO Poster.pdf

2020 SNO Annual Meeting Poster Presentation

Reflection: The work has been a great opportunity to study radiobiology, principles of radiotherapy and other treatment modalities for managing brain cancer disease. I gained hands-on experience on clinical data collection, learned about brain tumors and difficulties of the assessment of their response to treatment. It has also been good practice to apply knowledge obtained in the classroom to the real-world healthcare challenge which greatly relates to my research interests.