A Lung Cancer Specialized Programs of Research Excellence (SPORE) project, “SPORE Pilot Project: Machine Learning for Prognosis Assessment,” by Kim Sandler, M.D., Assistant Professor of Radiology, has been jointly funded by the University of Colorado’s Lung Cancer SPORE program and the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC) for one year in the amount of $50,000.
Bennett Landman, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Vanderbilt University, will lead the project with support from colleague Yuankai Huo, Ph.D., Research Assistant Professor of Computer Science, and Dr. Sandler.
"I am very grateful for the funding from VICC and the University of Colorado SPORE program, and for the opportunity to collaborate with Drs. Bennett Landman and Yuankai Huo,” said Dr. Sandler. “This is an exciting research initiative to design a more personalized approach to screening for lung cancer by incorporating machine learning from screening computed tomography (CT) into a clinically-based risk prediction model.”
The overall objective of the project is to combine imaging data from lung screening CT with clinical information and patient demographics to identify individual risk factors for lung cancer, and to better identify at-risk patients using the PLCOm2012 risk prediction model. Data utilized for the project will be derived from more than 1,000 electronic medical records of patients enrolled in the Vanderbilt Lung Screening Program (VLSP). The project has two goals:
- Improve lung cancer risk prediction accuracy on VLSP by incorporating longitudinal imaging feature, PheWAS features, ProWAS features, and clinical features using multi-resource learning.
- Develop multi-task learning approaches to provide emphysema diagnosis and nodule segmentation simultaneously with lung cancer risk prediction on VLSP.
“We believe the results will ultimately improve our ability to counsel patients on their risk for lung cancer and have the potential to impact screening guidelines,” added Dr. Sandler.
Operating on a five-year grant funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the University of Colorado’s Lung Cancer SPORE program focuses on basic research findings that may improve cancer patients and those at risk for developing lung cancer. The program’s NCI funding period ends in 2019.
