Seminar Summary

In our next edition of the EDIT SumS, we were joined by Dr. Mohammad U. Zahid who presented his work from Clinical Cancer Informatics Statistics in Oncology entitled: Simulating Cancer Recurrence Patterns From Post-Treatment Viable Tumor Burden Distributions. Dr. Zahid began his postdoctoral training as an IMO’er in 2019 in the lab of Heiko Enderling primarily studying radiotherapy modeling and development and evaluation of new clinical metrics for personalization of radiotherapy in patients. Most recently he holds an appointment at MD Anderson Cancer Center as an Instructor (research faculty appointment). 

In his presentation he described recent a recent framework he developed on connect models of tumor dynamics to recurrence patterns. Specifically, he explores a new way for exploring the effect of model parameters on the eventual curvature of simulated Kaplan-Meier plots. Qualitatively he then applies this framework retrospectively to RTOG 9003 demonstrating qualitative fits to different fractionation schemes in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma. 

As a fellow RadOnc IMO’er and Kaplan-Meier enthusiast, Dr.Zahid’s work is a wonderful take on the how we can approach making direct impacts to the development of future trials within the radiation medicine space. We look forward to seeing more of his success in this field. 

Check out his work and paper below!
Website: https://zahidmu.wordpress.com/about/
Paper: https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/CCI-25-00072