Kaylee to spend her summer analysing prostate cancer imaging

Thanks to the generous support of the UWA Data Institute, with funding provided by the tech design company BCG.X, UWA Medical Physics Masters student Kaylee Molin is being funded to undertake a summer vacation project with members of ACQI and the UWA Medical Physics research group. Kaylee will be analysing a series of PSMA PET/CT images of patients with advanced prostate cancer, together with information on the outcomes for patients of various treatments, to develop models that can predict how successful various treatment options might be. Kaylee’s work will identify biomarkers – digital indicators extracted from the patient data – that tell us how suitable a particular treatment could be for each individual patient. This work has the potential to unlock tools to individualise patient treatment, improve patient survival outcomes and reduce unnecessary medical expenses and inconvenience by avoiding treatments which are not likely to be effective. To do this, Kaylee will utilise her skills in physics, programming and data science to apply emerging analytics techniques that can identify image features that cannot be perceived by human observers. This support for Kaylee comes of the back of her participation and success, with the UWA Medical Physics team, in the 2023 Health Data Hackathon run by the WA Data Science Innovation Hub.