The Franz Edelman award is the most prestigious award for the practice of operations research, and each year’s competition is hotly contested. Nominees need to spend significant time preparing their presentations and almost all of them end up involving CEOs or other top executives in the firm.
This year, the winner of the Edelman Award is Sloan-Kettering for work entitled “Operations Research Answers to Cancer Therapeutics.” From the announcement
Yesterday was the first time that the association awarded the Edelman prize for a medical treatment. The Sloan-Kettering win demonstrates how operations research and mathematics are increasingly bringing improvements to health care, not only in the areas of policy, finance, and public health but in diagnosis and treatment, as well.
Dr. Marco Zaider, Attending Physicist in Medical Physics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center received the award together with Professor Eva K. Lee, Director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and HealthCare in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology.
The 2007 Franz Edelman Award winner was announced at a special awards banquet during The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®) Conference on O.R. Practice in Vancouver. http://meetings.informs.org/Practice07/ The finalists included Coca-Cola Enterprises, Hewlett-Packard, DaimlerChrysler, and the U.S. Coast Guard.
Dr. Lee and Dr. Zaider devised sophisticated optimization modeling and computational techniques to implement an intra-operative 3D treatment planning system for brachytherapy (the placement of radioactive “seeds” inside a tumor) that offers a safer and more reliable treatment.
The real-time intra-operative planning system eliminates pre-operation simulation and post-implant imaging analysis. Based on the range of costs of these procedures, Prof. Lee estimated conservatively that their elimination nationwide could save $450 million a year for prostate cancer care alone.
I am hoping for some press coverage for this (the winning work is very important, as are the contributions of the other finalists), but not much so far (just a couple pickups from health-oriented web sites). Reporters: great opportunity here!
Papers associated with the Edelman finalists will appear in the January-February issue of Interfaces.