Contact: Phil Hearn
An upcoming Mississippi State seminar will use computer modeling to illustrate how the live motion of breast cancer cells forms malignant tumors that can move toward other body sites, especially in patients exposed to continuous stress.
Eastern Illinois University mathematics professor Suhrit Dey will present "Computer Simulation of the Anatomy of Breast Cancer" at 2 p.m. Friday [Oct. 17] in Room 30 of the university's ERC.
A nationally prominent high-performance computing facility, the ERC is located across Highway 82 from the main campus at the Mississippi Research and Technology Park. It formerly was known as the Engineering Research Center.
MSU's Biomedical Computing Seminar Series is funded under a National Institutes of Health planning grant for a National Program of Excellence in Biomedical Computing. Co-principal investigators for the grant are Joe Thompson, an aerospace engineering professor who directs the Department of Defense Programming Environment and Training Center of the ERC; and Jan Chambers, a professor of toxicology and director of the Center for Environmental Health Sciences at the College of Veterinary Medicine.
Both Thompson and Chambers hold the rank of William L. Giles Distinguished Professor, the highest faculty honor at MSU.
Noting breast cancer strikes one of eight women in the United States, Dey said a mathematical model has been developed that displays--through computer graphics presented as time-dependent medical imaging--a series of interesting anatomical aspects of breast cancer. Most have been accepted as correct by oncologists and biochemists who deal with real-world scenarios, he added.
"With the onset of cancer when a tumor is formed, it starts growing when the patient is under continuous stress," Dey wrote in a scientific abstract. "If radiation is directed only toward the primary site of the tumor, many cancer cells could leave this location and move to other parts of the body to form neoplasms."
Dey, who holds a doctoral degree in aerospace engineering from MSU, said even if the tumor "is completely eradicated and there is no trace of cancer anywhere in the body, when the patient undergoes continuous stress or other forms of sickness that weaken the immune system, cancer reappears. Thus, once cancer strikes, some form of treatment must continue to keep it under control.
"Cancer may not be completely cured, but it can certainly be stopped from being fatal," he observed, noting these and other issues will be covered in his seminar presentation.
The next program in the seminar series takes place Oct. 27 at 2 p.m. in the Tait-Butler Room of the Wise Center at the College of Veterinary Medicine. Dr. Hisham A. El-Masri of the Computational Toxicology Laboratory of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry in Atlanta, will discuss "Application of Computational Methods to Toxicological Assessment of Mixtures: Binary Toxicological Interaction between Chlorpyrifos and Parathion as an Example."