The program in Biomathematics and Computing at The University of Texas System Cancer Center M.D. Anderson Hospital and Tumor Institute supports research and development in biostatistics, mathematical modelling, biomedical computing, and data acquisition and analysis. This research is comprised of six major areas, each with one or more projects. The areas are: I. Radiobiological Studies - Modelling of dose latency effects in tissue responses to fractionated radiation and development and evaluation of fitting methods for the direct analysis of tissue repair capacity/kinetics and latency time to expression of injury. II. Cellular Studies - 1) Analysis of structured models of interacting populations including normal tissues, tumor-host interactions, and the interaction of subpopulations within a heterogeneous tumor; 2) determination of the kinetic behavior of cell populations labelled with monoclonal antibodies to bromodeoxyuridine and followed through time by flow cytometry in both in vitro and in vivo systems. III. Aspects of Cancer Progression - Modelling the progression of solid tumors with emphasis on how tumor volume, nodal status, and other variables affect the sequence of metastasis development. IV. Problems of Design and Estimation in Cancer Biology and Clinical Investigation - 1) Minimization of functions subject to stochastic errors; 2) Monte Carlo study of the effects of ill conditioning on nonlinear regression analysis; 3) Asymptotic and finite sample effects in designs for dose- response estimation in radiobiology; 4) Statistical methods for the mixture model with log-logistic failure times. V. Image Processing - 1) Computer image processing of two- dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis with emphasis on standardization and precise quantitation of protein position and amount; 2) Detection and characterization of both local and global changes in G- banded human metaphase and prophase chromosomes from cancer patients. VI. Computer Analysis of Biological Macromolecular Sequence Data - Investigation of cooperative nonlinear dynamic behavior and the thermal denaturation characteristics of DNA together with the prediction of the behavior of DNA associated proteins.
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