Dariya Malyarenko

Dr. Malyarenko is an Associate Research Scientist, supporting operation of 3T Research MRI core that provides imaging services to over 50 multi-site clinical trials. These trials use multi-parametric/multi-contrast (mp)MRI to monitor disease progression and treatment response and require QA image analysis and bias correction for quantitative imaging biomarkers (QIBs). Her current research focus is on assessment and elimination of technical biases for advanced tissue diffusion imaging protocols to aid their practical implementation and enhance accuracy of derived QIBs. To establish credibility and streamline validation of emerging AI/DL-aided mpMRI acquisition and reconstruction methods, we are developing biomimetic image reference systems (phantoms) with ground-truth parameters that mimic mpMRI tissue properties. To minimize manual annotation efforts and variability, and accurately assess disease heterogeneity at multiple anatomic locations (e.g., for myelofibrosis clinical trial), we are exploring progressive dynamic training of DL segmentation algorithms for multi-contrast MR datasets both for pre-clinical and clinical applications.