Dr.Faisal Beg was PI on a 2020 MSFHR (Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research) Innovation to Commercialization Award funded to build a fully automated AI solution to measure body composition from routinely acquired CT images in Oncology/Sarcopenia/Cachexia. 

 Chemotherapy dose depends on the amount of muscle in a cancer patient, and measuring it accurately from their routinely acquired CT images is valuable to decide how much chemo to give them. Two individuals with the same BMI, an indirect measure of muscle mass currently used, can have widely varying muscle/fat ratio.  For a patient with more lean muscle mass, a higher chemo dose is tolerable, and the same dose can be toxic in a patient with the same BMI but lower muscle mass. This leads to suboptimal health outcomes in chemotherapy. The grant for PI Faisal Beg is to develop and translate a fully automated algorithm to segment muscle/bone and fat from routinely acquired 3D CT images. This information is necessary for optimizing chemotherapy dose for individuals thereby contributing to better health and quality of life in individuals suffering from cancer.