Project Grant R01CA297855

Award Date 8/1/24
Completion Date 7/31/28
Dollars Obligated $571K
Federal Grant Program
93.394
Assistance Type
Project Grant
Place of Performance
Storrs, CT 06269, USA

The University of Connecticut (UConn) has been awarded a $570,634 Project Grant from the National Cancer Institute's Cancer Detection and Diagnosis Research program (CFDA 93.394) to advance artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms for optimizing and personalizing breast cancer screening. The overarching objective is to develop a robust, multimodal, and longitudinal AI-based Computer-Aided Detection (AI-CAD) system that can improve the accuracy of breast cancer detection and localization by leveraging digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) imaging, patient history, and clinical risk factors. Key products and services to be delivered through this 4-year project include:

  1. Developing advanced self-attention graph learning models to achieve efficient and explainable representations of complex DBT images for cancer identification.
  2. Creating a multimodal longitudinal learning model that integrates current and historical imaging data with clinical information to enhance breast cancer detection and localization, similar to a radiologist's approach.
  3. Implementing practical strategies for clinical deployment of the AI-CAD system, such as expert-in-the-loop continual learning and algorithm-hardware co-design model compression to ensure adaptability and computational feasibility.
  4. Providing a comprehensive DBT imaging database to support training, evaluation, and validation of the proposed AI models.

This project aims to transform breast cancer diagnosis through greater accuracy, thereby improving patient outcomes and reducing healthcare costs. The innovative AI algorithms developed can also be applied to analyze other 3D biomedical images such as CT scans and brain MRI.

Generated 3/4/25, 2:22 AM