RSNA 2005 Lecture/Oration Preview
Three respected medical leaders will deliver honored lectures at RSNA 2005. They are Lawrence H. Schwartz, M.D., from New York City; William R. Brody, M.D., Ph.D., from Baltimore; and K.S. Clifford Chao, M.D., from Houston.
Eugene P. Pendergrass New Horizons Lecture
Imaging has become more important than ever in determining the effectiveness of various therapeutic interventions. Imaging also plays a vital role in therapeutic drug development, leading to speedier drug discovery and, in some instances, ensuring a drug’s safety.
Lawrence H. Schwartz, M.D. |
“Imaging can be used throughout the entire process of drug discovery,” explained Lawrence H. Schwartz, M.D., an associate professor of radiology at Weill Medical College at Cornell University. “This includes monitoring pharmaceutical intervention on specific targets in early-phase drug discovery, selecting an optimal drug dose to maximize therapeutic effect, and determining whether the drug under evaluation is actually impacting the desired biochemical pathway.”
Dr. Schwartz will deliver the New Horizons Lecture on Monday, November 28, on “Imaging in Drug Discovery: Emerging Roles and Challenges.”
He said the expanded use of imaging in the drug development process necessitates cooperation among multidisciplinary teams to solve increasingly complex issues.
“Radiologists and other imaging scientists must play a key role in these teams,” he said. “Active involvement by the entire radiology community in all phases of drug discovery—from the earliest proof of concept of a drug study, to the validation of imaging techniques used as the biomarker, to actual clinical patient studies—is crucial.”
In addition to his teaching responsibilities, Dr. Schwartz is an attending radiologist and director of the Laboratory for Computational Image Analysis at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. He is also the director of MR imaging and medical director of informatics and picture archiving and communication systems (PACS).
Dr. Schwartz may be best known for advancing the use of MR imaging to visualize tumors of the abdomen and pelvis, including preoperative imaging of complex liver, gallbladder, pancreatic, gynecologic and prostate cancers.
He has been an investigator or principal investigator in more than 130 research projects, including some funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
He is the author or co-authors of more than 100 articles, book chapters and other publications. He is a reviewer for about a half-dozen medical journals, including the American Journal of Roentgenology, Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Journal of the American Medical Association and the Lancet.
Annual Oration in Diagnostic Radiology
No one can predict the future of medical imaging, but 20 years from now, it will likely be a very different field than it is today.
“Two decades ago, few would have predicted the revolutionary advances that stem cells are poised to make today. Conversely, the predictions that were made back then about the promise of gene therapy have largely not yet been achieved,” explained William R. Brody, M.D., Ph.D., president of The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
William R. Brody, M.D., Ph.D. |
On Tuesday, November 29, Dr. Brody will deliver the Annual Oration in Diagnostic Radiology on “Radiology—Back to the Future.”
“People love innovation, but they dislike change,” he said. “In our rapidly evolving medical field, will radiologists be able to adapt to the pace of change required to survive?”
During his lecture, he will discuss how radiology has changed over the past 100 years and what should be done now to assure radiology’s future success.
Prior to accepting his current role as president of Johns Hopkins, Dr. Brody was a professor of radiology and provost of the Academic Health Center at the University of Minnesota. Before that, he served for seven years at Johns Hopkins as the Martin Donner Professor and director of the Department of Radiology, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, professor of biomedical engineering and radiologist-in-chief.
Dr. Brody earned his medical degree and his doctorate in electrical engineering at Stanford University. He is the author or co-author of more than 120 articles, books, book chapters and proceedings. He holds a patent on a multiple-energy x-ray subtraction imaging system and has made contributions in medical acoustics, CT, digital radiography and MR imaging. He is the co-founder and former chief executive officer of Resonex, Inc.
Annual Oration in Radiation Oncology
The paradigm in radiation oncology practice is beginning to shift.
Advances in biochemistry, molecular biology and technology have made functional imaging of physiological processes in tumors more feasible and practical.
K.S. Clifford Chao, M.D. |
“Before a new era of functional imaging-guided therapy becomes a clinical reality, there are obstacles that we must overcome,” said K.S. Clifford Chao, M.D., an associate professor of radiation oncology at The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. “These obstacles include imaging-pathological validation, spatial and temporal evolution of regions with biological interest within tumors, and a lack of clinical outcome studies.”
On Wednesday, November 30, Dr. Chao will deliver the Annual Oration in Radiation Oncology. His lecture, “Integration of Functional Images into Future Radiation Oncology Research and Practice,” will provide an overview of the role of current imaging strategies in radiation oncology, with a focus on functional imaging modalities as they relate to staging and molecular profiling of tumors, assessing therapeutic responses and defining radiation target volumes. He will also provide insights on improving operational efficiency of image-guided radiotherapy.
Prior to moving to M.D. Anderson in Houston, Dr. Chao was an associate professor at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. He has been an investigator or principal investigator for more than a dozen research projects over the past five years, many of them funded by NIH and the Department of Defense. He has several patents and patents pending.
Dr. Chao sits on the editorial boards of several journals, including the International Journal of Radiation Oncology Biology and Physics and the American Journal of Clinical Oncology, in addition to reviewing for journals, including Cancer, Clinical Cancer Research, Radiology, Lancet and Lancet Oncology. He also serves on multiple grant reviewing sessions for NIH and international funding agencies. He is the senior editor of two textbooks and the author of nearly 100 articles and book chapters.
The Annual Oration in Radiation Oncology is dedicated Rupert K.A. Schmidt-Ullrich, M.D., who died last December at the age of 61.
Dr. Schmidt-Ullrich founded the Radiation Oncology Department at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in 1988. He was the department’s chair until his death. He was also the associate director of the VCU Massey Cancer Center, and was administrative chief of the Division of Radiation Oncology at McGuire Veterans Affairs Hospital in Richmond.
Dr. Schmidt-Ullrich made enormous contributions to the field of radiation oncology that brought him international recognition. Most significantly, he was a co-author and editor of Principles and Practice of Radiation Oncology, the most comprehensive radiation oncology textbook available. He was also the founder of the journal Radiation Oncology Investigations.
