Calendar

In honor of the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act and October as National Disability Employment Awareness Month, join the Stanford Medicine Abilities Coalition (SMAC) for a first of its kind StanfordMed LIVE event focused on disability. Now more than ever during the COVID-19 pandemic, disabilities, health conditions, and illness impact not only our patients but also all of us, both personally and as members of the Stanford Medicine community. Stanford Medicine leadership will share information, answer questions, and engage in a roundtable discussion about the state of disability at Stanford and how best to support faculty, staff, and students living with disability and chronic illness. We encourage our community to submit questions and comments here to be shared broadly with the Stanford Medicine community. The same link can be used to request any accommodations needed for the livestream. Additional information for the webcast itself will be sent out closer to the event.

Livestream link: https://livestream.com/accounts/1973198/events/9288854

ZOOM LINK HERE

“High Resolution Breast Diffusion Weighted Imaging”
Jessica McKay, PhD

ABSTRACT: Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is a quantitative MRI method that measures the apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) of water molecules, which reflects cell density and serves as an indication of malignancy. Unfortunately, however, the clinical value of DWI is severely limited by the undesirable features in images that common clinical methods produce, including large geometric distortions, ghosting and chemical shift artifacts, and insufficient spatial resolution. Thus, in order to exploit information encoded in diffusion characteristics and fully assess the clinical value of ADC measurements, it is first imperative to achieve technical advancements of DWI.

In this talk, I will largely focus on the background of breast DWI, providing the clinical motivation for this work and explaining the current standard in breast DWI and alternatives proposed throughout the literature. I will also present my PhD dissertation work in which a novel strategy for high resolution breast DWI was developed. The purpose of this work is to improve DWI methods for breast imaging at 3 Tesla to robustly provide diffusion-weighted images and ADC maps with anatomical quality and resolution. This project has two major parts: Nyquist ghost correction and the use of simultaneous multislice imaging (SMS) to achieve high resolution. Exploratory work was completed to characterize the Nyquist ghost in breast DWI, showing that, although the ghost is mostly linear, the three-line navigator is unreliable, especially in the presence of fat. A novel referenceless ghost correction, Ghost/Object minimization was developed that reduced the ghost in standard SE-EPI and advanced SMS. An advanced SMS method with axial reformatting (AR) is presented for high resolution breast DWI. In a reader study, AR-SMS was preferred by three breast radiologists compared to the standard SE-EPI and readout-segmented-EPI.

“Machine-learning Approach to Differentiation of Benign and Malignant Peripheral Nerve Sheath Tumors: A Multicenter Study”
Michael Zhang, MD

ABSTRACT: Clinicoradiologic differentiation between benign and malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumors (PNSTs) is a diagnostic challenge with important management implications. We sought to develop a radiomics classifier based on 900 features extracted from gadolinium-enhanced, T1-weighted MRI, using the Quantitative Imaging Feature Pipeline and the PyRadiomics package. Additional patient-specific clinical variables were recorded. A radiomic signature was derived from least absolute shrinkage and selection operator, followed by gradient boost machine learning. A training and test set were selected randomly in a 70:30 ratio. We further evaluated the performance of radiomics-based classifier models against human readers of varying medical-training backgrounds. Following image pre-processing, 95 malignant and 171 benign PNSTs were available. The final classifier included 21 features and achieved a sensitivity 0.676, specificity 0.882, and area under the curve (AUC) 0.845. Collectively, human readers achieved sensitivity 0.684, specificity 0.742, and AUC 0.704. We concluded that radiomics using routine gadolinium enhanced, T1-weighted MRI sequences and clinical features can aid in the evaluation of PNSTs, particularly by increasing specificity for diagnosing malignancy. Further improvement may be achieved with incorporation of additional imaging sequences.

Radiology Department-Wide Research Meeting

• Curt Langlotz, MD, PhD: Overview of the AIMI Center
• Brian Hargreaves, PhD: Research Details from Town Hall, Q&A, and COVID19 Updates

Location: Zoom – Details can be found here: https://radresearch.stanford.edu
Meetings will be the 3rd Friday of each month.

Hosted by: Brian Hargreaves, PhD
Sponsored by: the the Department of Radiology

Radiology Department-Wide Research Meeting

Location: Zoom – Details can be found here: https://radresearch.stanford.edu
Meetings will be the 3rd Friday of each month.

February 19 Speakers: 

Bruce Daniel, MD – Center Overview: IMMERS

Jennifer McNab, PhD – Encoding and Decoding Diffusion MRI

Hosted by: Brian Hargreaves, PhD
Sponsored by: the the Department of Radiology

Radiology Department-Wide Research Meeting

• Dominik Fleischmann, MD: 3DQ Lab Overview
• Tom Soh, PhD: Research Updates

Location: Zoom – Details can be found here: https://radresearch.stanford.edu
Meetings will be the 3rd Friday of each month.

Hosted by: Brian Hargreaves, PhD
Sponsored by: the the Department of Radiology

Date: April 10, 2021 (8 AM-6PM)

• • 8 AM-8:20 AM opening remarks Zainub and Pete
  • 8:20 AM-9:20 AM Talk 1 “I fought the law and no one won”
• 10 minute Break
• 9:30 AM-10:30 AM talk 2 students and doctors with disabilities panel

• 20 minute break

• • 10:50 AM-11:50 AM Breakout
  • One hour lunch  (TBD)
  • 12:50 PM-1:50 PM Talk 3 the frontiers of disability research 
• Lisa Meeks is moderating
• Bonnie Swenor invited
  • 10 minute break
  • 2:00 PM-3:00 PM breakout 2
• 10 minute break
• 3:10 PM-4:10 PM talk 4 do-it-yourself disability advocacy (Poullos/Tolchin with students)

• 4:10 PM-4:30 PM closing remarks

• 4:30 PM-6 PM virtual happy hour

Radiology Department-Wide Research Meeting

• Research Announcements
• Michelle James, PhD – Detecting and Tracking Immune Responses in the Brain and Beyond using PET
• Ryan Spitler, PhD – Precision Health and Integrated Diagnostics (PHIND) Center

Location: Zoom – Details can be found here: https://radresearch.stanford.edu
Meetings will be the 3rd Friday of each month.

Hosted by: Brian Hargreaves, PhD
Sponsored by: the the Department of Radiology

Targeted violence continues against Black Americans, Asian Americans, and all people of color. The department of radiology diversity committee is running a racial equity challenge to raise awareness of systemic racism, implicit bias and related issues. Participants will be provided a list of resources on these topics such as articles, podcasts, videos, etc., from which they can choose, with the “challenge” of engaging with one to three media sources prior to our session (some videos are as short as a few minutes). Participants will meet in small-group breakout sessions to discuss what they’ve learned and share ideas.

Please reach out to Marta Flory, flory@stanford.edu with questions. For details about the session, including recommended resources and the Zoom link, please reach out to Meke Faaoso at mfaaoso@stanford.edu.

Radiology Department-Wide Research Meeting

• Research Announcements
• Koen Nieman, M.D., PhD – Coronary Artery Disease by Computed Tomography
• Martin Willemink, M.D., PhD – Translating Emerging Cardiovascular CT Techniques into the Clinical Setting

Location: Zoom – Details can be found here: https://radresearch.stanford.edu
Meetings will be the 3rd Friday of each month.

Hosted by: Daniel Ennis, PhD
Sponsored by: the the Department of Radiology