The department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine of the Amsterdam UMC has been awarded by two Hanarth Fonds grants.
The first Hanarth Fonds grant (400.000 Euro) of Ronald Boellaard aims at the application of artificial intelligence (AI) methods to improve prognosis and treatment response prediction based on FDG PET/CT studies of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma patients. This project is an extension of a successfully running international consortium project PETRA (petralymphoma.org). The Hanarth Fonds grant will be used to investigate the use of radiomics analysis in combination with machine learning as well as the use of convolution neural networks for deep radiomics analysis of FDG PET/CT to better predict response to treatment, thereby avoiding futile treatments, as compared to current FDG PET/CT reads.
The second grant of the Hanarth Fonds (also 400.000 Euro) enables radiologist Pim de Graaf, together with colleagues of the Dutch Retinoblastoma Center, to assess the value of MRI for the detection of genetic subtypes of this rare form of paediatric eye cancer and to improve the detection of risk factors for developing distant metastasis (in particular tumor invasion into the optical nerve). To reach these goals deep learning algorithms for automated tumour delineation will be developed. These delineations will subsequently be used for radiomics analyses to characterize and quantify the tumour phenotype.