Walter O’Dell, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Dept. of Radiation Oncology
Abstract: Thanks in part to improved treatment, there are now over 3.5 million breast cancer survivors in the US. However, many of these treatments are known to injure the heart. If we can diagnose severe heart injury early on, then there are medications that we can give to improve patient survival. Even better, if we find that a patient has severe heart injury early during treatment, we can change treatment to better spare the heart. Unfortunately, the usual methods for measuring heart function cannot detect the small changes that we need to make a diagnosis. Fortunately, we have recently shown that small changes can be reliably measured using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and precise modeling of the heart geometry. Using this approach, we measured heart function in breast cancer patients who received radiation therapy as part of their cancer treatment. We found that the more radiation the heart receives, the larger the decrease in heart function. We then looked at another patient, who had a low starting level of function and had received a medium-high amount of radiation to the heart. Based on the first set of patients, we predicted that this patient would go into heart failure within 10 months. And, unfortunately, this patient did in fact have heart failure just 7 months after treatment. We are now investigating ways to further improve the sensitivity of 3D MRI of the heart to changes in heart function to better understand how cancer treatments influence the heart.
Dr. Walter O’Dell is a biomedical engineer with expertise in medical imaging. Within the Department of Radiation Oncology at the UF Health Cancer Center, he researches ways that radiation affects heart and lung tissue. His lab is also working on new ways to detect and track early-stage tumors non-invasively from 3D MRI and CT scans.
Core Standards
SC.912.N.1.4 Identify sources of information and assess their reliability according to the strict standards of scientific investigation.
SC.912.N.1.5 Describe and provide examples of how similar investigations conducted in many parts of the world result in the same outcome.
SC.912.N.1.6 Describe how scientific inferences are drawn from scientific observations and provide examples from the content being studied
SC.912.N.2.4 Explain that scientific knowledge is both durable and robust and open to change. Scientific knowledge can change because it is often examined and re-examined by new investigations and scientific argumentation. Because of these frequent examinations, scientific knowledge becomes stronger, leading to its durability.
SC.912.N.2.5 Describe instances in which scientists’ varied backgrounds, talents, interests, and goals influence the inferences and thus the explanations that they make about observations of natural phenomena and describe that competing interpretations (explanations) of scientists are a strength of science as they are a source of new, testable ideas that have the potential to add new evidence to support one or another of the explanations
SC.912.N.4.2 Weigh the merits of alternative strategies for solving a specific societal problem by comparing a number of different costs and benefits, such as human, economic, and environmental
SC.912.L.14.6 Explain the significance of genetic factors, environmental factors, and pathogenic agents to health from the perspectives of both individual and public health.
SC.912.L.14.16 Describe the anatomy and histology, including ultrastructure, of muscle tissue.
SC.912.L.16.5 Explain the basic processes of transcription and translation, and how they result in the expression of genes
SC.912.L.16.8 Explain the relationship between mutation, cell cycle, and uncontrolled cell growth potentially resulting in cancer.
SC.912.L.16.10 Evaluate the impact of biotechnology on the individual, society and the environment, including medical and ethical issues.
