Author Interviews, Cancer Research, JAMA, Lung Cancer, NIH, Race/Ethnic Diversity, Stanford / 01.11.2023

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Summer S Han, PhD Associate Professor Quantitative Sciences Unit Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research (BMIR) Department of Neurosurgery and Department of Medicine Department of Epidemiology & Population Health (by Courtesy) Stanford University School of Medicine Dr. Eunji Choi PhD Instructor, Neurosurgery Department: Adult Neurosurgery Stanford University School of Medicine   MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
  • Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the United States, killing about 127,000 people annually, but it can be treatable if detected early.
  • Low-dose computed tomography, or CT scan, has been shown to significantly reduce the number of lung cancer deaths. But because the radiation delivered by the scans can be harmful (they use on average about 10 times the radiation of standard X-rays), only those people at relatively high risk for lung cancer should be screened. The two biggest risk factors for lung cancer are exposure to tobacco smoke and age. Current national guidelines that rely on age and smoking exposure to recommend people for lung cancer screening are disproportionally failing minority populations including African Americans, according to a new study led by researchers at Stanford Medicine.
  • In 2021, the national guidelines by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) issued revised recommendation guidelines on lung cancer screening, lowering the start age from 55-year to 50-year and the smoking pack-year criterion from 30 to 20, compared to the 2013 USPSTF criteria. In comparison to the 2013 criteria, the new modifications have been shown to lessen racial disparities in screening eligibility between African Americans and Whites. However, potential disparities across other major racial groups in the U.S., such as Latinos, remains poorly examined.
  • Meanwhile, risk prediction model assesses a person’s risk score of developing an illness, such as lung cancer.
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ASCO, Author Interviews, Cancer Research, Lung Cancer, University of Pennsylvania / 05.06.2023

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Lova L. Sun, MD, MSCE Medical Oncology Assistant Professor of Medicine Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: An common clinical question for patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer with long-term response to immunotherapy-based treatment is how long to continue treatment. The major clinical trials stopped immunotherapy at a maximum of 2 years, but in clinical practice many patients and clinicians continue treatment beyond this time point. We conducted a retrospective study of lung cancer patients across the US with long-term response to immunotherapy, to compare survival between those who stopped treatment at 2 years vs those who continued beyond 2 years. We found that there was no statistically significant difference in survival between the two groups. (more…)
Lung Cancer, Race/Ethnic Diversity / 02.05.2023

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Andres Kohan MD MHSc. in Translational Research Joint Department of Medical Imaging University Health Network Mount Sinai Hospital and Women's College Hospital University of Toronto Toronto, Canada   MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Inequalities in access to healthcare for oncologic patients and its impact on quality of life and survival have been previously described. However, there also exists reports pointing out that when factors contributing to socioeconomic inequality are accounted for differences in outcome between races remain identifiable. In this context, we sought to evaluate the presence of disparities in imaging in a selected population of patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) within AACRs Project GENIE Biopharma Consortium (BPC) dataset v 1.1. This database is the largest in existence that has not only the patients’ imaging and clinical staging/follow-up, but also the genetic profile of the patients’ tumors. (more…)
Author Interviews, Brigham & Women's - Harvard, Cancer Research, JAMA, Lancet, Lung Cancer, Medical Imaging, Technology / 07.09.2022

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Raymond H. Mak, MD Radiation Oncology Disease Center Leader for Thoracic Oncology Director of Patient Safety and QualityDirector of Clinical Innovation Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School Cancer - Radiation Oncology, Radiation Oncology Department of Radiation Oncology Brigham and Women's Hospital MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What is the algorithm detecting? Response: Lung cancer, the most common cancer worldwide is highly lethal, but can be treated and cured in some cases with radiation therapy.  Nearly half of lung cancer patients will eventually require some form of radiation therapy, but the planning for a course of radiation therapy currently entails manual, time-consuming, and resource-intensive work by highly trained physicians to segment (target) the cancerous tumors in the lungs and adjacent lymph nodes on three-dimensional images (CT scans). Prior studies have shown substantial variation in how expert clinicians delineate these targets, which can negatively impact outcomes and there is a projected shortage of skilled medical staff to perform these tasks worldwide as cancer rates increase. To address this critical gap, our team developed deep learning algorithms that can automatically target lung cancer in the lungs and adjacent lymph nodes from CT scans that are used for radiation therapy planning, and can be deployed in seconds. We trained these artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms using expert-segmented targets from over 700 cases and validated the performance in over 1300 patients in external datasets (including publicly available data from a national trial), benchmarked its performance against expert clinicians, and then further validated the clinical usefulness of the algorithm in human-AI collaboration experiments that measured accuracy, task speed, and end-user satisfaction. (more…)
Author Interviews, Cancer Research, COVID -19 Coronavirus, Lung Cancer, Surgical Research / 21.06.2022

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Emanuela Taioli, MD, PhD Director, Institute for Translational Epidemiology Professor, Population Health Science and Policy Professor, Thoracic Surgery Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai New York, NY MedicalResearch.com:  What is the background for this study?  Response: NYC experienced a halt on all elective care from March 22 to June 8, 2020, provoking reduced cancer screening rates, and delayed cancer care and treatment. We wanted to quantify the effect of the “pause” on cancer stage at diagnosis using lung cancer as an example of a condition where early diagnosis can dramatically modify survival. (more…)
Author Interviews, Cost of Health Care, JAMA, Lung Cancer, Stanford, USPSTF / 24.10.2021

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Summer S Han, PhD Assistant Professor Quantitative Sciences Unit Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research (BMIR) Neurosurgery and Medicine Stanford University School of Medicine Stanford, CA 94304  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: The US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) issued their 2021 recommendation on lung cancer screening lowering the start age from 55 to 50 years and the minimum pack-year criterion from 30 to 20, relative to the 2013 recommendations. Although costs are expected to increase with the expanded screening eligibility, it is unknown if the new guidelines for lung cancer screening are cost-effective. (more…)
AACR, Author Interviews, Cancer Research, Genetic Research, NIH / 23.04.2021

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Nishanth Ulhas Nair, Ph.D. Affiliation: Staff Scientist at Cancer Data Science Laboratory, Center for Cancer Research National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institutes of Health (NIH) Bethesda, Maryland, USA. Date: April 22, 2021 Dr. Raffit Hassan and Dr. Eytan Ruppin at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) are the senior authors of this study.  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Malignant mesothelioma is an aggressive cancer with limited treatment options and poor prognosis. An in-depth knowledge of genetic, transcriptomic and immunogenic events involved in mesothelioma is critical for successful development of prognostics and therapeutic modalities. In this study we aim to address this by exploring a new large scale patient tumor dataset of 122 mesothelioma patients, called NCI mesothelioma patient data, along with their genomic, transcriptomic, and phenotypic information. Unlike previous large-scale studies which have been focused on malignant pleural mesothelioma patients, our dataset contains an approximately equal representation of malignant pleural and peritoneal mesothelioma patients which allows to identify any differences between them. (more…)