Despina Kontos, associate professor of radiology, and Lewis A. Chodosh, chair of cancer biology and associate director of the Abramson Cancer Center, both in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, have received a five-year $4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop more effective, personalized approaches for selecting tailored treatment options for breast cancer patients.

Dr. Kontos and Dr. Chodosh aim to determine whether certain tumor-imaging characteristics, combined with artificial intelligence, can provide additional information to established imaging tools and genetic methods for predicting risk for breast cancer recurrence.

With this grant, the Penn researchers have several goals: to better capture the variety of primary tumors in size, shape and molecular composition; to determine the value of the imaging features in combination with molecular profiling in predicting risk of recurrence; and to perform an independent validation of their model with prospectively collected data at Penn.

Considering that multiple types of imaging are increasingly used as part of routine clinical care, the study could provide new imaging biomarkers to improve treatment decisions at a minimal additional cost.