Aradhana Venkatesan
Associate Professor
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
Department of Diagnostic Radiology
My research aims are to develop novel imaging biomarkers that may be used for risk stratification, adaptive therapy planning, and surrogate endpoint use in cancer clinical trials and to optimize image guided therapies for cancer. The objective of these efforts is to enable rational personalized image-guided cancer therapy, with a special interest in genitourinary and gynecologic malignancies. My work employs novel functional and metabolic quantitative MRI techniques to evaluate the physiology of viable tumor and to distinguish these findings from non-tumor volumes. Additional aims are to develop and validate novel quantitative MRI and PET techniques for radiotherapy planning and assessment of response to radiotherapy/chemoradiation and to facilitate the integration of image-guided radiotherapy into cancer immunotherapy regimens.
Possible projects include both pre-clinical and clinical opportunities:
-Ongoing projects involve clinical imaging analysis in previously treated patients with gynecologic and genitourinary cancers and correlation of these findings to clinical outcomes, including tumor recurrence, progression-free survival and overall survival.
-Ongoing funded pre-clinical studies are evaluating functional and metabolic imaging biomarkers of radiotherapy response in pre-clinical cancer models, correlating imaging findings to outcomes at histopathology.
Education & Training
M.D. - Harvard Medical School - 2001