Milan Stehlik - Colloquium Speaker

Visiting Professor, Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, University of Iowa
Date: 
Thursday, October 31, 2019 - 3:30pm
Colloquium Title: 
New perspectives in cancer risk assessment
Location: 
Reception at 3:00 p.m. in 241 SH / Talk at 3:30 in 61 SH

Milan Stehlik

Abstract:

Dr. Stehlik will consider discrimination between mammary cancer and mastopathy tissues, which plays a crucial role in clinical practice. Based on his recent projects, Dr. Stehlik will discuss results of how stochastic processes can model both tissue modalities, mammary cancer and mastopathies. He will use exponential families with geometric-topological canonical parameters, like Euler characteristic. Application of such discrimination techniques has been applied to real biopsy images from patients in German clinics with reasonable improvement of false-positive rates. Such an approach can be considered as stochastic and statistic modelling for image processing which can provide good benchmarks for false-positive rates in most typical cancer assessments. Pure machine learning techniques can benefit from these obtained results and thus contribute to addressing “inherent data ambiguity” in medical imaging. The inter-patient variability of fractal dimension for mammary cancer is high and therefore multi-fractality can serve as a better concept. This is a feasible and parsimonious solution for a more delicate problem of multi-objective aggregation of information, relevant in modeling clinical assessor intervariability. Such problem is well visible if one considers several fractal and texture characteristics of biopsy images. This helps to refine a fractal cancer hypothesis, well applicable for several standard cancers, e.g., mammary or prostate cancer. In this talk, Dr. Stehlik will also introduce a very different type of cancer growth which is not related to fractal cancer hypothesis. Nephroblastoma (given by Wilms tumor) is the typical tumor of the kidneys appearing in childhood, which does not satisfy fractal cancer hypothesis. He will illustrate by recent pre-/post-clinical study the effect on invasive treatments to Euclidean volumes of such tumors.

Affiliations:
1) Department of Statistics & Actuarial Science, University of Iowa, USA
2) Department of Applied Statistics & Linz Institute of Technology, Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria
3) Institute of Statistics, Universidad de Valparaiso, Valparaiso, Chile