IDiA Director Dr. Pallavi Tiwari recently received a $1.02M Merit Award from the Department of Veterans Affairs for a project entitled “Artificial Intelligence-based Decision Support for Chemotherapy-response Assessment in Brain Tumors”. This research aims to engineer improvements in the treatment of those diagnosed with glioblastoma (a highly aggressive brain tumor with poor survival statistics), particularly for veterans with brain cancer linked to exposure to ionizing radiation during military service.
With this new award, IDiA will develop and validate biomarkers which predict if a patient will respond more favorable to conventional treatment (chemoradiation following surgery) or be a potential candidate for genomically-driven drug therapies. IDiA will also be developing AI-driven tools to differentiate between post-treatment tumor recurrence and benign treatment-induced radiation effects for the purpose of improving the quality of life for Veteran GBM patients by avoiding dangerous and expensive surgical biopsy when possible and providing timely disease management.