Multi-Criteria Optimization – Improved Knowledge for Knowledge-Based Planning

Multi-Criteria Optimization (MCO) is a new and upcoming way to quickly create and assign radiotherapy treatment plans to patients. How does it compare clinical treatment plans? MCO allows the user to adjust various treatment plans that the computer has created based on upper and lower dose limits. Varian, the program that houses MCO treatment plans, has an easy to use interface to determine the best individualized plans for each cancer patient. Clinical treatment planning may take longer than MCO-generated plans, with possible inconsistent and suboptimal quality.https://digitalcommons.unmc.edu/surp2020/1004/thumbnail.jp

Uncertainty Analysis of Radiomic Features in Normal and Pancreatic Cancer Patients

Medical imaging is an essential component of clinical cancer treatment, with Computer Tomography scans being the most popular type of imaging used for such diagnostic purposes. Currently, the analysis of these scans is mainly done to interpret areas of concern, as well as to determine the size of the lesion or tumor. Experimentation with these scans and their corresponding computer programs has led to recent success in quantitative imaging analysis. This type of analysis is redefining the role of medical imaging as a new source of biomarker data. Radiomics is a method of high-throughput extraction on hundreds of features encrypted in these scans and images based on the delineation of boundary of a 3D volume of interest (VOI), called segmentation. These features include the shape, and the first-, second-, and higher-order statistics of a 3D VOI. The features provide a comprehensive and quantitative description of a tumor’s phenotype and are more in-depth than qualitative descriptors from doctors. This is an active area of research because of the advantages for biomarker development, which focus on risk assessment, treatment response predictions, and the relationship between image features and genomics. The inconsistency and variability of segmentation and extraction negatively affects the robustness of the predictive model and its ability to generate with a different dataset. Patient positioning and image acquisition also affect each feature to varying degrees by introducing different perturbations such as image rotation. In this study, we attempt to evaluate the uncertainties introduced by the image perturbation (e.g., rotation or translation) as well as image resamplinghttps://digitalcommons.unmc.edu/surp2021/1013/thumbnail.jp

A Day in the Life of a Dairy Cow

“A Day in the Life of a Dairy Cow” is a children’s book designed to increase families’ knowledge about various aspects of the dairy industry. The book was created after research was conducted on the best ways to combat misinformation and evaluation of the public’s key concerns regarding dairy farming and products. A picture book was designed with components that target both children and the adults that are reading the books to or with the kids. The book, which follows a dairy cow throughout a typical day on the farm, address common concerns such as confined housing and antibiotic usage in a way children can understand. This educates the readers on these topics without directly listing facts, reducing concerns further down the road. At the same time, more specific facts aimed at adults are included with each topic to further their knowledge as they read books to their children or grandchildren. The objective of this project is to counteract frequently-spread misinformation and decrease consumer concern about common dairy industry practices. To complete this project, copies of the book will be made available to libraries, extension offices, and classrooms.</p