Laurent Dercle, MD, PhD, Selected For ABR's Holman Research Pathway

First-year radiology resident Laurent Dercle, MD, PhD, will complete his residency training as a participant of the B. Leonard Holman Research Pathway, an alternate pathway to diagnostic radiology residency certification that provides selected residents with time and mentorship during training for basic science or clinical research.

Holman Research Pathway residents are selected by the American Board of Radiology's Alternate Pathway Committee based on a demonstration of exceptional clinical and research abilities and a commitment pursing an academic career.

Dercle will focus his research on artificial intelligence (AI)-driven extraction of information from medical images to guide clinical decision making in cancer patients who are being treated with systemic therapies such as immunotherapy. By training AI on routine standard of care medical images, Dercle's signatures have consistently outperformed historical standard of care tumor size-based imaging biomarkers. Dercle has identified two critical barriers to the translation into clinical practice, which he plans to address in the next phase of his research.

Dercle's work addresses an urgent need in radiology to properly evaluate response to immunotherapy, a new approach to cancer treatment which produces unique patterns of tumor response and progression.

As a Holman Research Pathway resident, he will work under the mentorship of Lawrence H. Schwartz, MD, James Picker Professor of Radiology and chair of the department of radiology, and in association with the department's Computational Image Analysis Lab. "Laurent has accumulated a track record of research that would be remarkably productive and influential for any researcher," says Schwartz. "His work is truly exceptional considering that he is still at such an early stage of his career."

Dercle has board certification in nuclear medicine from France, MSc level 2 in medical physics, a PhD in oncology, and has authored 93 international peer-reviewed publications, many of which are frequently cited and relied on by other investigators. He is the recipient of 12 grants and awards.

The Holman Research Pathway was established in 1999 to address the shortage of physician investigators in diagnostic radiology and radiation oncology. Dr. Dercle is the third Holman scholar from the Department of Radiology at CUIMC.