An assistant professor at Florida Atlantic University received a $701,000 grant from Precess Medical Derivatives to personalize radiation therapy for cancer treatment.
Wazir Muhammad, a principal investigator and professor at the university's Charles E. Schmidt College of Science, is using artificial intelligence to improve outcomes for patients. He is leading a three-year project that will use health data to create a "digital twin" of cancer patients to better understand their condition.
"Using personal health data, genetic information about the tumor, and patient treatment and follow-up data, digital twins will simulate diagnoses and treatment options to help physicians choose the most effective treatments and monitor responses over time,” he said.
The digital twin will use observational data to represent a patient’s current state of health and predict future transitions, according to a news release.
While there has been an effort to personalize chemotherapy for the treatment of cancer based on patient health data, Muhammad said that is lacking for radiation therapy.
More than two million new cancer cases will be diagnosed in 2024, according to data from the American Cancer Society. About half of all people diagnosed with cancer receive radiation therapy as part of their treatment.
Muhammad is using deep reinforcement learning, a method teaching computers to make decisions, to learn from patient data and adapt treatment plans based on observed outcomes. The project intends to develop a process to anonymously collect, categorize and analyze patient data, build deep reinforcement learning models and evaluate digital twins against standard health care protocols.
"Importantly, if this project is successful, it could help to close health disparities gaps between different geographic or demographic groups,” Muhammad said.
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