Amita Shukla Dave, PhD

My group’s research focuses on developing and implementing advanced MR imaging physics techniques such as dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI), diffusion-weighted MRI (DW-MRI) and magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) for clinical application in cancer. I established the head and neck cancer MRI research program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. Over the years, I have developed an innovative program in multimodality imaging for head and neck cancer, using multi-parametric MRI and ¹⁸F-fluoromisonidazole PET and ¹⁸F-fluorodeoxy glucose PET. The program focuses on clinical applications such as prediction of outcome and early assessment of treatment response in head and neck cancer patients. Additionally, I have led the integration of molecular markers with multimodality imaging to gain insight into aspects of tumor biology that may be predictive of treatment failure or response, and to determine how these aspects of tumor biology are reflected on imaging.

In the field of prostate imaging, my groundbreaking research has included the development of new nomograms for clinically low-risk prostate cancer patients incorporating both clinical and magnetic resonance data; the development of new criteria for MRS analysis, which showed that polyamines play an important part in prostate cancer detection; and the integration of MRI, MRS, and molecular marker data for the detection of insignificant prostate cancer and the prediction of disease recurrence.