Zhu, collaborators win pilot grant to study endometrial cancer
Quing Zhu will work to develop a noninvasive, high-resolution method for imaging endometrial cancer
Endometrial cancer is the most common cancer of the female reproductive system in the U.S., affecting 65,000 women each year. However, there are no noninvasive screening tests to detect the disease early.
Quing Zhu, the Edwin H. Murty Professor of Engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering, along with Lindsay Kuroki, MD, associate professor of obstetrics & gynecology, and Ian Hagemann, MD, PhD, professor of pathology & immunology, both at the School of Medicine, have received a one-year, $62,526 grant from the Route 66 Endometrial Cancer SPORE Developmental Research Program (DRP), funded by the National Cancer Institute. The funding will allow them to develop a noninvasive imaging system that provides an assessment of patients who may be at risk for endometrial cancer. Zhu will also work with doctoral students Taylor Nie and Sanskar Thakur on the pilot project.
Zhu and her collaborators will use optical coherence tomography, a noninvasive, high-resolution imaging technique that can take images up to 3 millimeters deep. The resolution is considered an “optical biopsy.” They have already been successful in using optical coherence tomography (OCT) and machine learning to develop a colorectal cancer imaging tool.
The team will use a miniature, fiber-optic optical coherence tomography catheter to take images of the endometrial lining in living patients with a normal endometrium, endometrial hyperplasia and early-stage endometrial cancer. They will use those images to develop and train an AI model to diagnose risk factors of endometrial hyperplasia and cancer that could inform diagnostic outcomes.
