Speaker: Dr. Lorena Escudero Sanchez, University of Cambridge

Title: AI applications in radiological image analysis for cancer research

Abstract:

Imaging is one of the main pillars of clinical protocols for cancer care that provides essential non-invasive biomarkers for detection, diagnosis and response assessment. The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools have proven potential to transform the analysis of radiological images, by significantly reducing processing time, by increasing the reproducibility of measurements and by improving the sensitivity of tumour detection compared to the standard visual interpretation, leading to cancer early detection. In this talk I will highlight some of the work done in our Radiogenomics and Quantitative Image Analysis group, covering methods for automated tumour segmentation, in particular in ovarian cancer, a highly complex, heterogeneous and metastatic cancer. I will also present studies on Radiomic features, quantitative measurements extracted directly from images such as CT or MR, and examples of Machine Learning models based on these variables to predict response to chemotherapy treatment. Finally, we will briefly see some examples of clinical applications of such image analysis methods.

About the Speaker:

Dr Lorena Escudero Sánchez is a particle physicist, with a PhD in neutrino physics, who has worked in large international collaborations for the neutrino oscillation experiments T2K (Japan), MicroBooNE and DUNE (US). She now works on AI applications to radiological image analysis for cancer research, at the Department of Radiology of the University of Cambridge and CRUK Cambridge Centre. She is also part of the Repository team of the National Cancer Imaging Translational Award (NCITA) consortium across different UK institutions. As a Senior Research Associate at the Department of Radiology in Cambridge, she leads the Radiogenomics and Quantitative Image Analysis group. She is also a Turing Fellow of The Alan Turing Institute, the UK national centre for AI and Data Science, a Borysiewicz Interdisciplinary Fellow of the University of Cambridge, and a Rokos Postdoctoral Research Associate at Queens’ College Cambridge.