UNLV recently received a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to study the effects of radiation exposure and the risk of breast cancer in occupational and medical radiation.

The multi-year grant is led by Francis Cucinotta, professor in the Department of Health Physics and Diagnostic Sciences within UNLV’s School of Integrated Health Sciences. Cucinotta’s research focuses on health effects caused by radiation, including radiation treatment of cancer and astronaut risk assessments related to space travel.

“This federal grant will allow us the opportunity to utilize artificial intelligence to look at the RNA sequences in the genes of thousands of individual cells, something that we just couldn’t do even a few years ago,” Cucinotta said. “Biomedical technology is evolving rapidly, and this grant will help us develop new techniques to better analyze the effects of low-dose radiation in the diagnostic use of radiation and in occupational exposures.”

According to the American Cancer Society, breast cancer is the second-most common form of cancer diagnosed among women, only behind skin cancer, and accounts for 30% of all new cancer diagnoses each year.

UNLV’s grant is part of a $19.5 million investment from the U.S. Department of Energy for integrated biological and computational low-dose radiation research at universities across the country. According to Cucinotta, anything less than 100 milligray of radiation – the equivalent of three or four CT scans – is considered low-dose exposure. 

“The AI will be able to look at the low-dose datasets as well as datasets from atomic bomb survivors and medical patients, and even rodents who have been exposed to radiation,” he said. “With a physics-based DNA repair model, you’re typically only able to look at between 10 and 20 signals. With AI, you’re able to look at 10,000 signals. You need new technology to analyze all of that data.”

Cucinotta, along with Janice Pluth from the Department of Health Physics and Diagnostic Sciences and Mingon Kang from UNLV’s Department of Computer Science, will analyze the existing datasets while running their own experiments against new data as it is received.

“As new technologies continue to emerge, it is imperative that they are used to help provide answers to our medical problems. That is exactly what we hope to accomplish with this grant,” said Ronald T. Brown, dean of UNLV’s School of Integrated Health Sciences. “As science and medicine continue their evolution, grants like these are instrumental to UNLV remaining at the forefront of healthcare and research in the fight against some of the world’s most unrelenting maladies.”