Alagoz, UW-Madison-led cancer modeling consortium lands $8.7 million NIH grant

Oguzhan Alagoz, the Procter & Gamble Bascom Professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is among a group of researchers to receive a five-year, $8.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to use computational modeling to guide clinical translation of breast cancer screening and treatment strategies.

Alagoz and Amy Trentham-Dietz, a UW-Madison professor of population health sciences, are co-leads of the Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network (CISNET) Breast Working Group, which in addition to UW-Madison includes Stanford University, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Georgetown University, and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

The researchers will use the funding from the National Cancer Institute to model the impact of different screening and treatment strategies across specific patient populations, including the use of artificial intelligence technologies to interpret screening mammograms. Within the project, Alagoz will lead the scientific aims evaluating AI-based mammography interpretation technologies, which are being developed rapidly and are expected to play an increasingly important role in breast cancer screening and breast imaging. The researchers will also examine the potential benefits of new cancer therapies and the impact of post-diagnosis behavioral interventions on survival outcomes.

Alagoz is one of eight principal investigators and the only engineer on the grant.