Dr. Loew receives a research grant for head and neck cancer project

Professor Murray Loew has received a one-year, $42,500 grant from the GW Cross-Disciplinary Research Fund for a project titled “Development of a novel radiomics platform to predict outcomes in advanced head and neck cancer” .

The grant is a collaboration with Professor Robert Zeman, chairman of Radiology, and Professor Sharad Goyal, who will arrive in September as professor and director of the Radiation Oncology Division.

Our Student Wins the MIPS XVII Student Scholarship

Our student Kristina Landino has won the MIPS XVII Student Scholarship for this year. This is what Kristina says about her research and the award:

Salience is defined as the extent to which an object catches the eye of the viewer or the extent to which an object in an image “pops out”. Currently, a multitude of programs exist which calculate salience using a wide variety of methods. For this paper, we compared 16 programs, testing their accuracy both in locating salient points in general images and in locating abnormalities in mammograms.

We first compared these programs on a set of images from the CAT2000 database, which features different scenes, including art, cartoons, people, outdoor scenes, and machinery. We used eye-fixation data maps as truth for this set of images. Secondly, we compared the programs’ ability to find abnormalities in mammograms, where location and radius of the abnormality are the truth data, confirmed by biopsy. The AUC is used to determine the accuracy in both of these sets of cases.

I was really excited to receive a scholarship for this work, the MIPS XVII Student Scholarship. This scholarship will cover expenses to the MIPS conference, where I can present this research and meet others with similar research interests.