Hui Lin
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most aggressive brain cancer. Even with aggressive treatment, patients survive a median of only 12–15 months.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biomedical Engineering
Computer Science
- Topics
glioblastoma
brain tumors
radiation therapy
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2028
What they work on
- Build White Matter Infiltrative Risk maps by identifying which white matter tracts glioblastoma tends to invade across more than 500 patients and combining them with each patient's DTI fiber density maps.
- Integrate the risk maps with anatomical MRI, MGMT methylation and TERT promoter mutation status using a transformer-based deep learning model with cross-attention, a way of letting different data types inform each other.
- Validate the voxel-level predictions against where tumors actually progressed and compare them with standard radiation therapy target volumes.
- Confirm the predicted infiltration pathways using tissue samples from 298 patients whose locations were matched to the imaging.
More about the research
One reason is how radiation therapy is aimed. Doctors draw a uniform margin around the tumor visible on MRI and treat everything inside it. But glioblastoma cells creep into surrounding brain, often along white matter tracts, the brain's bundles of nerve fibers. As a result, hidden tumor is missed, healthy brain is irradiated unnecessarily, and the cancer almost always comes back.
Why it matters
For patients with glioblastoma, radiation targets guided by tumor biology could reach hidden tumor along white matter pathways while sparing healthy brain from radiation damage. This proof of concept is meant to lay the groundwork for a clinical trial of WMIR-guided radiation therapy. Such a trial could test whether this approach improves tumor control in this fatal cancer.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Hyunsuk Shim
Emory University, GA·Biomedical Engineering
Develop rapid, motion-robust spectroscopic MRI scans of the whole brain that improve image quality for detecting infiltrating brain tumor.
Joline Fan
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Neuroscience·Early-career
Identify physiologic brain network dynamics across sleep and wake states in patients with focal epilepsy, using magnetoencephalography (MEG) combined with diffusion tensor imaging and tractography of white-matter connections.
Yasmin Zakiniaeiz
Yale University, CT·Neuroscience·Early-career
Measure baseline dopamine D2/3 receptor levels in the prefrontal cortex of men and women with alcohol use disorder and sex-matched controls, using PET imaging with the radiotracer [11C]FLB457.
The school
University of California-San Francisco: 89 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 164 research doctorates a year.
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