Bio-X Graduate Student Fellow

Awarded in 2018
Home Department: Mechanical Engineering
Faculty Advisors: Marc Levenston (Mechanical Engineering) and Garry Gold (Radiology)

Research Title: Contrast Agent Diffusion as a Computed Tomography Biomarker for Early Osteoarthritis Detection

Research Description: Osteoarthritis is a debilitating joint disease that affects over 12% of the adult US population Photo of graduate student Mary Hall in the lab, working at a laptop showing bone scan images. and costs $136B annually to treat, and development of effective treatments for OA is hindered due to the disease’s slow progression. Mary aims to develop better biomarkers for early detection of osteoarthritis by combining the expertise of mechanical engineers, radiologists, and computer scientists to develop and test a computational model of contrast agent diffusion into cartilage for computed tomography (CT). This will help determine if the method can better distinguish between healthy and diseased human knee joints in vivo and compare its sensitivity to other early OA biomarkers in development such as quantitative MRI.

WHERE IS SHE NOW?

Mary is a postdoctoral scholar in the JOINT group at Stanford.