Publications by authors named "Ak Murat"

Background: Glioblastoma is the most aggressive adult primary brain cancer, characterized by significant heterogeneity, posing challenges for patient management, treatment planning, and clinical trial stratification.

Methods: We developed a highly reproducible, personalized prognostication and clinical subgrouping system using machine learning (ML) on routine clinical data, MRI, and molecular measures from 2,838 demographically diverse patients across 22 institutions and 3 continents. Patients were stratified into favorable, intermediate, and poor prognostic subgroups (I, II, III) using Kaplan-Meier analysis (Cox proportional model and hazard ratios [HR]).

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  • - The study focuses on the importance of constructive dissent in organizations and examines how social capital (the networks and relationships employees have) influences employees' ability to voice dissent in the workplace.
  • - Data was collected through surveys from 240 textile industry employees in Türkiye, and structural equation modeling was utilized to analyze the relationships between social capital, organizational socialization, and dissent behavior.
  • - Results show that social capital positively influences both organizational dissent and socialization, with organizational socialization acting as a partial mediator between social capital and dissent, highlighting the role of relationships in fostering an environment for employees to express dissent.
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  • The study assessed how radiomics—a method of extracting and analyzing features from medical images—can predict the tumor microenvironment (TME) and response to anti-PD-1 treatment in patients with recurrent/metastatic head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC).
  • Using advanced techniques like CT scans and machine learning algorithms, researchers built models to evaluate disease control rates, progression-free survival, and overall survival, alongside assessing tumor characteristics like hypoxia and immune cell presence.
  • Findings indicated that radiomics could accurately predict treatment outcomes and TME features, suggesting its potential as a valuable tool, although more extensive research is needed to confirm these results.
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  • The study investigates the differences in treatment responses among melanoma patients based on tumor characteristics, utilizing radiomic analysis of medical images to identify non-invasive biomarkers.
  • This research involved 291 patients treated with either immune checkpoint inhibitors or BRAF targeted therapy, and 667 tumor lesions were analyzed for treatment outcomes.
  • The findings show significant organ-level differences in treatment response and variability, with specific machine-learning models accurately predicting disease control or progression based on radiomic features, highlighting the potential for personalized treatment strategies.
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Purpose: To evaluate the growth and quality of an interventional radiology (IR) training model designed for resource-constrained settings and implemented in Tanzania as well as its overall potential to increase access to minimally invasive procedures across the region.

Materials And Methods: IR training in Tanzania began in October 2018 through monthly deployment of visiting teaching teams for hands-on training combined with in-person and remote lectures. A competency-based 2-year Master of Science in IR curriculum was inaugurated at the nation's main teaching hospital in October 2019, with the first 2 classes graduating in 2021 and 2022.

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Background: Immune-checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) have showed unprecedent efficacy in the treatment of patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). However, not all patients manifest clinical benefit due to the lack of reliable predictive biomarkers. We showed preliminary data on the predictive role of the combination of radiomics and plasma extracellular vesicle (EV) PD-L1 to predict durable response to ICIs.

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Background: Preoperative symptom severity in cervical spondylotic myelopathy (CSM) can be variable. Radiomic signatures could provide an imaging biomarker for symptom severity in CSM. This study utilizes radiomic signatures of T1-weighted and T2-weighted magnetic resonance imaging images to correlate with preoperative symptom severity based on modified Japanese Orthopaedic Association (mJOA) scores for patients with CSM.

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Background And Purpose: To determine the incidence of acute neuroimaging (NI) findings and comorbidities in the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19)-infected subjects in seven U.S. and four European hospitals.

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Deep learning (DL) models have provided state-of-the-art performance in various medical imaging benchmarking challenges, including the Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) challenges. However, the task of focal pathology multi-compartment segmentation (e.g.

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  • Machine learning can work well, but it often struggles to make accurate predictions on new data, which is called out-of-sample generalizability.
  • To solve this problem, researchers are using a method called Federated ML that allows computers to share information about how well they're learning without actually sharing the data itself.
  • In a big study with 71 locations around the world, scientists created a model to help detect brain tumors more accurately, showing a significant improvement compared to older methods and hoping to help with rare illnesses and data sharing in healthcare.
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Purpose: Although glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common primary brain malignancy, few tools exist to pre-operatively risk-stratify patients by overall survival (OS) or common genetic alterations. We developed an MRI-based radiomics model to identify patients with EGFR amplification, MGMT methylation, GBM subtype, and OS greater than 12 months.

Methods: We retrospectively identified 235 patients with pathologically confirmed GBMs from the Cancer Genome Atlas (88; TCGA) and MD Anderson Cancer Center (147; MDACC).

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Male breast lesions are relatively less common. The most encountered malignant lesion in the male breast is ductal adenocarcinoma; and benign lesions are gynecomastia, fibrocystic disease, intramammary lymph node, fibroadenoma, lipoma and epidermal inclusion cyst (EIC), respectively [5,6]. To date, there had been published only a few cases of EIC of the male breast in literature [3,5,6].

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Accurate skull stripping facilitates following neuro-image analysis. For computer-aided methods, the presence of brain skull in structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) impacts brain tissue identification, which could result in serious misjudgments, specifically for patients with brain tumors. Though there are several existing works on skull stripping in literature, most of them either focus on healthy brain MRIs or only apply for a single image modality.

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Background: Immune-checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) changed the therapeutic landscape of patients with lung cancer. However, only a subset of them derived clinical benefit and evidenced the need to identify reliable predictive biomarkers. Liquid biopsy is the non-invasive and repeatable analysis of biological material in body fluids and a promising tool for cancer biomarkers discovery.

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Immune therapeutics are revolutionizing cancer treatments. In tandem, new and confounding imaging characteristics have appeared that are distinct from those typically seen with conventional cytotoxic therapies. In fact, only 10% of patients on immunotherapy may show tumor shrinkage, typical of positive responses on conventional therapy.

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Background: Malignant gliomas are deadly tumours with few therapeutic options. Although immunotherapy may be a promising therapeutic strategy for treating gliomas, a significant barrier is the CD11b tumour-associated myeloid cells (TAMCs), a heterogeneous glioma infiltrate comprising up to 40% of a glioma's cellular mass that inhibits anti-tumour T-cell function and promotes tumour progression. A theranostic approach uses a single molecule for targeted radiopharmaceutical therapy (TRT) and diagnostic imaging; however, there are few reports of theranostics targeting the tumour microenvironment.

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The need to identify biomarkers to predict immunotherapy response for rare cancers has been long overdue. We aimed to study this in our paper, 'Radiomics analysis for predicting pembrolizumab response in patients with advanced rare cancers'. In this response to the Letter to the Editor by Cunha , we explain and discuss the reasons behind choosing LASSO (Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator) and XGBoost (eXtreme Gradient Boosting) with LOOCV (Leave-One-Out Cross-Validation) as the feature selection and classifier method, respectively for our radiomics models.

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Low-grade gliomas (LGGs) are tumors that affect mostly adults. These neoplasms are comprised mainly of oligodendrogliomas and diffuse astrocytomas. LGGs remain vexing to current management and therapeutic modalities although they exhibit more favorable survival rates compared with high-grade gliomas (HGGs).

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Background: We present a radiomics-based model for predicting response to pembrolizumab in patients with advanced rare cancers.

Methods: The study included 57 patients with advanced rare cancers who were enrolled in our phase II clinical trial of pembrolizumab. Tumor response was evaluated using Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumors (RECIST) 1.

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