The American Roentgen Ray Society (ARRS) announces that two 2021 ARRS Scholarships, provided by ARRS’ The Roentgen Fund, have been awarded to Tatiana Kelil, MD, of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and Camilo Jaimes, MD, of Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) and Harvard Medical School.

Kelil, an assistant professor of radiology in UCSF’s breast imaging section, will use the protected time afforded by her ARRS Scholarship to pursue personalized breast cancer risk assessment using imaging biomarkers and machine learning.

“One such imaging biomarker is background parenchymal enhancement (BPE),” Kelil says. Noting that BPE is associated with increased breast cancer risk, she added, “machine learning tools can deduce these patterns that might not be discernible to humans from the imaging data,” which could improve conventional risk prediction models.

A neuroradiologist at BCH specializing in advanced pediatric MRI techniques, Jaimes will use the secured research time from his ARRS Scholarship to investigate fetal diffusion tensor imaging and microstructural brain abnormalities in fetuses with congenital heart disease. 

Investigation of these abnormalities in fetuses has been hindered by technical challenges of the acquisition—“mainly fetal motion,” says Jaimes. Reiterating that identifying the onset of abnormalities in brain development and their relationship to clinically relevant outcomes is critical, his study “will employ novel fetal diffusion MRI techniques to address these aims, harnessing cutting-edge MRI processing tools to correct for fetal motion.”

Kelil and Jaimes will be formally recognized as dual recipients of the 2021 ARRS Scholarship during the opening ceremony of the ARRS Virtual Annual Meeting on Sunday, April 18, 2021.