Dr. Thaler's current research interests center on statistical analytic paradigms using data transformations and dimension-reduction techniques to obtain parsimonious mixed-effect models and longitudinal data models. He uses both baseline and time-dependent covariates to evaluate the prognostic significance of laboratory assays and questionnaire data. He also employs a similar strategy to investigate properties of new statistical methods by large scale Monte Carlo simulation. Recently, he has worked on the following applications: in vitro quantification of mutant cell subpopulations using fluorescence-activated cell sorting; development and validation of health-related quality of life measures; statistical characterization of sequential measurements of both established and novel tumor markers in ovarian cancer patients; outcomes research pertaining to critical care medicine; cardiac and pulmonary complications among surgical and medical inpatients; assessment of time trends in metrics of hospital inpatient and outpatient volume; potential genetic correlates of pain, analgesia and opioid pharmacology in a well-defined surgical population; measurement of cognitive function in cancer patients; and in the field of medical imaging: comparison of radioactive tracers used in PET scanning, animal models of multimodality imaging, lactate MR spectroscopy, and dynamic contrast enhanced (DCE) MRI, and clinical utility of DCE-MRI in head and neck cancer.
Selected Bibliography:
Dupont J, Tanwar MK, Thaler HT, Fleisher M, Kauff N, Hensley ML, Sabbatini P, Anderson S, Aghajanian C, Holland EC, Spriggs DR. Early Detection and Prognosis of Ovarian Cancer Using Serum YKL-40. Journal of Clinical Oncology 2004;22:3330-3339.
Chang VT, Hwang SS, Thaler HT, Kasimis B, Portenoy RK. The Memorial symptom assessment scale. Expert Review of Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research 2004;4:171-178.
Moore KH, Thaler HT, Tan LK, Borgen PI, Cody III, HS. Immunohistochemically detected tumor cells in the sentinel lymph nodes of patients with breast carcinoma. Biologic metastasis or procedural artifact? Cancer 2004;100:929-934.
Patel MI, Subbaramaiah K, Du B, Chang M, Yang P, Newman RA, Cordon-Cardo C, Thaler HT, Dannenberg AJ. Celecoxib inhibits prostate cancer growth. Evidence of a COX-2 independent mechanism. Clinical Cancer Research (in press).
Temple LKF, Bacik J, Savatta S, Gottesman L, Paty P, Weiser M, Guillem J, Minsky BD, Kalman M, Thaler HT, Schrag D, Wong WD. The development of a validated instrument to evaluate bowel function after sphincter preserving surgery for rectal cancer. Dis Colon Rectum (in press).
