Dr. Metin Gurcan receives the Young Investigator Award to pursue project on children's neuroblastoma prognosis
Friday 05/02/2008
The Children’s Neuroblastoma Cancer Foundation has awarded Dr. Metin Gurcan of OSU BMI with the young investigator award to pursue his project “Computer-assisted Prognosis of Neuroblastoma.”
Neuroblastoma is one of the most common pediatric solid tumors with the lowest 5-year survival rate among all childhood cancers. There is a considerable variation among pathologists in evaluating histopathology of neuroblastoma tumors. Dr. Gurcan will develop a computer-assisted system for more accurate and less variable prognostic evaluation of neuroblastoma tumors. He will be collaborating with Dr. Hiroyuki Shimada of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, a world-famous neuroblastoma researcher, whose classification system was adapted as the International Neuroblastoma Classification System to assess neuroblastoma tumors. Dr. Gurcan will also be collaborating with Center for Childhood Cancer at the Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus.
Dr. Gurcan will use this two year award to develop new techniques in neuroblastoma cancer image analysis. In his recent publications Dr. Gurcan has demonstrated the feasibility of analyzing neuroblastoma tissue slides to extract clinically relevant information with high accuracy.
Dr. Gurcan is a very active researcher in computerized analysis of histopathological images (http://www.bmi.osu.edu/~gurcan). He is organizing a special focus session on computational histopathology at IEEE ISBI conference; a workshop on histopathology imaging at MICCAI Conference and will be teaching a tutorial on “Microscopic Image Processing and Analysis Techniques” at IEEE’s International Conference on Image Processing.
Dr. Gurcan has been elected to the grade of “Senior Member” by IEEE and is the recipient of The National Cancer Institute, “caBIG Embodying the Vision Award.”