Chemotherapy or not? New discoveries help determine who will benefit from chemotherapy

Case Western Reserve University researchers and partners, including a collaborator at Cleveland Clinic, are pushing the boundaries of how "smart" diagnostic-imaging machines identify cancers—and uncovering clues outside the tumor to tell whether a patient will respond well to chemotherapy. The recent findings in breast and lung cancerresearch build off work pioneered by biomedical engineering professor Anant Madabhushi, founder of the Center for Computational Imaging and Personalized Diagnostics. He is senior author on a pair of recent journal publications and joined by scientists from the Case School of Engineering, Cleveland Clinic and New York University Langone Medical Center. This work, in total, heralds a more personalized future in medical diagnoses, Madabhushi said. "And it is further evidence that information gleaned by computational interrogation of the region outside the tumors on MRI (magnetic resonance images) and CAT (computed tomography) scans is extremely valuable and can predict response and benefit of chemotherapy in lung and breast cancer patients," said Madabhushi, the F. Alex Nason Professor II of Biomedical Engineering at the Case School of Engineering.