Cindy Kang, a PhD student in public health sciences at the Brown School, has received a Summer Fellows grant from the St. Baldrick’s Foundation to conduct pediatric oncology research aimed at using artificial intelligence (AI) to improve outcomes for children diagnosed with cancer.
This summer, Kang is working under the mentorship of Brown School Professor Kim Johnson to study how AI can help predict the risk of metastasis at the time of a child’s initial cancer diagnosis. Metastases account for a large portion of cancer-related deaths in children. The project seeks to promote earlier detection and reduce mortality, with particular attention to how socioeconomic determinants, such as neighborhood income and education levels, influence survival rates among children with metastatic cancer.
They plan to combine AI with traditional epidemiology methods to develop a predictive model capable of estimating a child’s risk of developing metastases. Such a tool could help identify high-risk patients earlier, enabling more timely interventions and improving treatment strategies.
In a recent interview with RiverBender.com, Johnson emphasized the critical role of social determinants in cancer outcomes.
“We definitely know that social factors influence survival outcomes,” Johnson said. “Hopefully our work can lead to less children getting diagnosed at a later-stage disease if we can start addressing these social factors, which impact the ability of a family to receive optimal cancer care.”
In the same interview, Kang highlighted the advantage of using AI in the research.
“For the AI part, we’re basically using machine learning models to predict factors associated with pediatric cancer, metastasis and survival,” Kang explained. “The reason that we’re using AI models instead of traditional epidemiology models is the AI models provide better prediction power, and it can also overcome a lot of the statistical assumptions that we have to overcome, or we have to deal with when using traditional epidemiology methods. So that’s why we integrate AI, and also because AI is cutting-edge.”
The St. Baldrick’s Foundation is the largest charitable supporter of childhood cancer research in the U.S.
Read the full interview at RiverBender.com.