Children’s Neuroblastoma Cancer Foundation extends Young Investigator Award to Dr. Gurcan
Wednesday 07/08/2009
The Children's Neuroblastoma Cancer Foundation has extended a second year of support to Dr. Metin Gurcan as part of their Young Investigator Award project.
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 is developing a computer-assisted system for more accurate and less variable prognostic evaluation of neuroblastoma tumors. He is 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 use award to develop new techniques in neuroblastoma cancer image analysis. Using the support of this grant in the last year, Dr. Gurcan conducted research and recently published papers to demonstrate the feasibility of analyzing neuroblastoma tissue slides to extract clinically relevant information with high accuracy.
Publications from the last year emerging from this support include:
Sertel O, Kong J, Shimada H, Catalyurek U, Saltz JH, Gurcan MN, “Computer-aided prognosis of neuroblastoma on whole-slide images: Classification of stromal development,” Pattern Recognition, vol. 42, no. 6, pp. 1093-1103, 2009.
Kong J, Sertel O, Shimada H, Boyer KL, Saltz JH, Gurcan MN “Computer-aided evaluation of neuroblastoma on whole-slide histology images: Classifying grade of neuroblastic differentiation,” Pattern Recognition, vol. 42, no. 6, pp. 1080-1092, 2009.