MSK Experts Discuss Breast Cancer

Posted on by

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month In October, numerous media outlets featured experts from MSK during Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Here are some highlights:

  • Dr. Elizabeth Comen offered guidance in a Huffington Post article about providing support to someone after a mastectomy. She said that you should not assume the person will have reconstructive surgery, or that a mastectomy means someone will never get breast cancer again. Rarely, it can recur or a patient can get a diagnosis of metastatic breast cancer.

  • MedPage Today interviewed Dr. Neil Iyengar about a literature review he coauthored on the association between breast cancer and obesity. The paper concluded that current risk assessments do not include people with certain metabolic risks, regardless of weight and BMI. Loss of fat mass reduces some risk factors.

  • The New York Times featured a small study indicating that chemotherapy may be sufficient treatment for certain breast cancer patients, allowing them to avoid surgery. Dr. Monica Morrow pointed out the small size of this early trial, saying it is not enough to lead to practice change.

  • PIX 11 spoke to Michelle Benjamin, an MSK Care Coordinator and breast cancer survivor. She advised not to let fear keep you from getting changes in your body checked out early.

  • The UK Huffington Post reported on male breast cancer. Dr. Nour Abuhadra discussed signs and risk factors and said male breast cancer is usually diagnosed later than female breast cancer as men are not typically screened for it.

  • Cancer Today Magazine covered a study that found the drug Enhertu can increase the lifespan of certain patients with metastatic breast cancer. Dr. Elizabeth Comen explained how Enhertu functions, and recommended that patients ask their doctors about their HER2 status to see if they might be candidates for the treatment.

  • Radiology Business quoted Dr. Christopher Comstock about the launch of a study for which he is the primary investigator. The screening trial aims to determine the efficacy of contrast-enhanced mammography in patients with dense breasts.

  • Newsday quoted Dr. Julia Brockway-Marchello in an article about the rising rates of breast cancer in women under 40. Dr. Brockway-Marchello said that while we don’t yet know what caused this rise, it may be connected to as-yet-unidentified environmental and/or genetic factors.

New eBook: Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging

Posted on by

Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging is a new 4-volume set that offers complete coverage of the science behind nuclear medicine with the clinical aspects of diagnostic imaging. Beginning with sections on the physics related to nuclear medicine, radiation biology/safety, and instrumentation/quality control, it then covers radiochemistry and the development of new radionuclide therapy/tracers, and basic techniques such as positron emission tomography (PET) and single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT). 

Content also includes clinical aspects, with sections on clinical/preclinical nuclear imaging, as well as other in vivo molecular imaging techniques such as optical imaging, digital image analysis (radiomics), as well as the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in diagnostics.

Covidence Full-Text PDF Enhancements

Posted on by

Covidence, the systematic review (SR) project management tool that is available for use by everyone in the MSK community via a site license, has recently introduced some noteworthy improvements related to importing the PDF attachments for the full-text screening stage.

  • You can now export only the records of citations missing the Full-Text PDFs.

Being able to easily extract a list of citations of studies missing full text PDFs does not sound like a game-changing enhancement. However, for SR team members who regularly dedicate hours of work harvesting the full-text PDFs for the Full-Text Screening stage of a project, this functionality will be a huge time-saver.

  • You can now export citations as an RIS file for import into reference manager programs beyond Endnote, including:

    1. Endnote
    2. Cochrane Registry of Studies
    3. Zotero
    4. Mendeley
    5. RefWorks

With an increasing number of citation manager program options available to users, including here at MSK – see Citation Management LibGuide for more details – it is nice to see that Covidence is becoming inter-operable with more tools to better match user preferences.

  • You can now bring in Open Access articles using Unpaywall and automatically upload them when studies move to to the Full Text screening or Data Extraction stages.

With the amount of available Open Access journal content continuously increasing, having the ability to automatically bring in the needed full-text that is openly-available on the web will become even more useful as time goes on. Furthermore, individual PDFs that users have already downloaded can now be brought into Covidence using a convenient drag and drop option, making adding these PDFs to their corresponding citation records on the screening list easier than ever.

  • You can now use the Bulk PDF Upload Tool in conjunction with either Endnote or Zotero.

The Bulk PDF Upload Tool involves a two step process that includes saving a list of citation records as an Endnote XML file after all of the needed PDFs have been harvested into a citation manager. Zotero now also accommodates the “Endnote XML” filetype, helping Covidence once again become more versatile for users who choose to use the Zotero citation manager instead of Endnote.

To learn more about Covidence, be sure to check out these training options or Ask Us at the MSK Library.