Congratulations to David Ollila, MD, James and Jesse Millis Distinguished Professor in the Division of Surgical Oncology and Endocrine Surgery. Dr. Ollila received an Award from the John Wayne Cancer Foundation (JWCF) for the project entitled “Artificial Intelligence-Aided Digital Pathology to Improve Diagnosis in Metastatic Melanoma.” The award is for $25,000 from 8/1/2021 thru 7/31/2022.
The John Wayne Cancer Foundation’s mission is to bring courage, strength, and grit to the fight against Cancer. JWCF funds novel and innovative programs that improve cancer patient outcomes and save lives through research, education, awareness, and support. The John Wayne Alumni Fellows Grant Program provides John Wayne Alumni Fellows with funding to further clinical research efforts in surgical oncology.
“We are so grateful to the John Wayne Cancer Foundation for supporting our research group’s work in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to identify sentinel node metastases. This is an important continuation of our research that began investigating AI in primary melanomas. We believe that eventually the AI work in the primary melanoma and the sentinel node metastasis will be synergistic and lead to improved diagnostic accuracy. In the era of immunotherapy, diagnostic accuracy is crucial to developing therapeutic treatment plans for metastatic melanoma patients.” – Dr. Ollila