Florian J. Fintelmann

As the head of Thoracic Imaging Percutaneous Thermal Ablation at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Fintelmann is integrated into the Lung and Thoracic Cancer Team at the Mass General Cancer Center. His research focuses on improving cancer care with quantitative image analysis, machine learning, and image-guided minimally invasive interventions.

Dr. Fintelmann leads a multi-disciplinary team that studies lung cancer from early diagnosis (lung cancer screening with low-dose chest computed tomography) to advanced disease. He was co-senior author on a seminal article describing the development and validation of the Sybil algorithm. As a Thoracic Interventional Oncologist, Dr. Fintelmann believes that patients with cancer benefit from minimally invasive image-guided diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. He is studying percutaneous thermal ablation (cryoablation, microwave ablation) and needle biopsies in patients with lung cancer and lung metastases. Dr. Fintelmann advocates for percutaneous thermal ablation to treat lung cancer in patients with interstitial lung disease and local recurrent lung tumors following radiation therapy. Clinical trials have investigated the synergy between immunotherapy and cryoablation in patients with advanced lung cancer and advanced melanoma (cryoimmunotherapy, cryoimmunology).

Dr. Fintelmann continues to improve quantitative image analysis pipelines for body composition analysis. Body composition analysis has been shown to improve the risk stratification of patients with cancer for appropriate therapies. His team leverages machine learning to extract morphomic data such as skeletal muscle and adipose tissue from computed tomography exams of the chest and abdomen obtained as part of routine clinical care.