Research and Education Newsletter v35- Internal - Flipbook - Page 12
Division of Radiation Oncology Annual Research and Education Newsletter: Fiscal Year 2020
Resiliency, Hope, and Valuable
Learning from our Patients: Sources of
Inspiration for One Radiation Oncologist
FACULTY PROFILE
Caroline Chung, M.D., is an associate professor in radiation
oncology and diagnostic imaging who has a multitude of
goals and achievements in research. “Research is essential to
helping us better understand disease processes so that we can
continue improving treatments for our patients,” says Chung .
She enjoys teaching and mentoring and sharing this message
with trainees and members of her computational lab focused on
quantitative imaging. She has also enjoyed working with a large
multidisciplinary team across divisions in exciting collaborations
with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on
two funded projects investigating imaging and biofluid biomarkers
of cardiac and neurocognitive toxicity following radiation exposure.
With the turn of events in 2020, she has been working to support
the institutional Data Driven Determinants for COVID-19 Oncology
Discovery Effort (D3CODE), which includes a COVID-19 project in
partnership with Microsoft AI for Good. Working with the Natural
Language Processing (NLP) and Data Science (DS) teams at MD
Anderson, they have built a pathway or “pipeline” to sift through
thousands of publications to extract insights around the pandemic.
“This project was motivated by the rapidly evolving body of
literature around COVID-19 at a rate that was just not consumable
by human reading speeds,” Chung explains. With the recently
funded grant, the Microsoft AI for Good team will be working
with Chung and the NLP/DS teams at MD Anderson to automate
this pipeline to facilitate sifting through the immense amount of
literature to help answer many research questions. “We also hope
to use and modify this automated pipeline to interrogate other
bodies of literature including cancer publications,” Chung adds.
She also leads the Advanced Imaging pillar for the Radiation
Oncology Strategic Initiatives (ROSI). “The greatest
accomplishment of this pillar has been how it has brought
together an engaged and growing multidisciplinary community
(radiation oncology, medical physics, imaging physics, radiology,
imaging technology, and radiation therapy) focused on learning,
researching and implementing advanced imaging,” Chung says.
Over the past several years Chung has worked to grow the field of
advanced imaging, specifically with magnetic resonance imaging
(MRI). Most notably, Chung and other faculty within the advanced
imaging pillar catalyzed the collaboration that brought Elekta’s
MR-Linac to MD Anderson as the first site in North America to
treat a patient with radiation therapy coupled with the improved
imaging quality and tumor tracking capability provided by MRI.
Other achievements that have sprouted from this pillar are the
industry alliances with RaySearch Laboratories and Siemens
Healthineers. Chung and other faculty are collaborating with
RaySearch to develop tools to help standardize and automate
radiation treatment protocols and also integrate quantitative
imaging for radiation treatment planning and better estimates of
delivered radiation in patients. Within the Siemens partnership, the
overarching goal is to improve the quality of imaging data captured
and used in cancer care and research in order to improve the
measurement of outcomes and enable precision medicine.
With her efforts divided among clinical care, research, and other
academic pursuits, Chung additionally invests time to serve as
Co-Chair of the Tumor Measurement Initiative, which aims to build
an institutional platform to support standardized, automated,
quantitative imaging-based tumor measurement across each
patient’s journey to advance multidisciplinary, data-driven, high
precision cancer treatment. More recently, she is also Co-Chair
of the Data Governance Program version 2.0, which aims to build
a comprehensive and systematic data governance program
grounded in team data science principles. “I want to improve the
quality of research that we carry out in medicine so that we can
efficiently make progress and generate robust insights from our
observations and measurements so that we can learn as much as
we can from each patient encounter,” Chung adds. From inspiration
to innovation, Chung is indeed continually pushing the field of
radiation oncology, imaging, and mining the rich data to find more
solutions that benefit our patients.
Caroline Chung, M.D. Image taken pre COVID-19 pandemic (10/16/2019)
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