Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center hosted its annual H.N. Saurage IV Distinguished Lecture Series on Oct. 25 with Maryellen L. Giger, PhD, University of Chicago, as this year’s distinguished speaker. Giger’s presentation was entitled “Artificial Intelligence in Medical Imaging and the Need for MIDRC.”
This lecture series, made possible through the support of the H.N. Saurage IV Family Fund, is dedicated to advancing education and research for medical physicists, students, and various other health professionals. Each year, a distinguished researcher is invited to Louisiana to share discoveries and insights with the local cancer care community. The series serves to highlight new and ongoing research initiatives aimed at improving outcomes for patients as part of Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center’s medical physics program and through an academic partnership with LSU to train the next generation of scientists.
The event also featured a competitive poster session showcasing research by graduate students from the LSU Department of Physics and Astronomy, which provided an opportunity for student researchers to present their work and interact directly with experts such as Giger and Jonas Fontenot, MD, Mary Bird Perkins’ chief executive officer. Since 1980, Mary Bird Perkins and LSU have partnered to offer the Dr. Charles M. Smith Medical Physics Program, one of just 60 accredited medical physics programs in the United States. Lily Dickson and Corinne Vanya placed first with their poster “Development and Evaluation of a Lung X-Ray Interferometry Imagine System.” Nathan Dobranski came in second place with “Utilizing Large Language Models for Efficient and Accurate Clinical Data Enrichment,” and Olivia Magneson placed third with “Comparison of Respiratory Motion between 4D-MR and 4D-CT in Compression Belt Patients.”
Pictured at the event are, left to right, Hank Saurage, philanthropist and Cancer Center board member; Maryellen L. Giger, PhD, A.N. Pritzker Distinguished Service Professor of Radiology, Committee on Medical Physics, and the College at the University of Chicago; Donna Saurage, philanthropist and Cancer Center board membe; Kenneth Hogstrom, PhD, medical physicist and prior chief of physics, Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center; and David Solis, Jr., PhD, academic medical physicist, Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center.