Current Research Interests

Dr. Thaler's current research interests center on data analytic paradigms that utilize data transformations and dimension-reduction techniques to obtain parsimonious and informative statistical models. He applies the strategies to analyze clinical and laboratory data, as well as to investigate properties of new statistical methods by Monte Carlo simulation. He recently expanded collaboration with the Strategic Planning Group of Hospital Administration to explore information retrieved from the MSKCC Institutional Data Base (IDB), with the goal of developing metrics and statistical models of trends in demographic, clinical and geographic profiles of patients undergoing several modalities of active treatment throughout the MSK health care system. He has continued to work on the following applications: clinical and cognitive outcomes and statistical characterization of sequential measurements of tumor markers in ovarian cancer patients; outcomes research pertaining to critical care medicine; cardiac and pulmonary complications among surgical patients; and clinical and laboratory studies using various medical imaging techniques, including PET scanning, MR spectroscopy, dynamic contrast enhanced MRI, and bioluminescent imaging.

Selected Bibliography

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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).

5. 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)