Octavia Bane, PhD

Dr. Octavia Bane is an Instructor in the BioMedical Engineering and Imaging Institute (BMEII) and the Department of Radiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Bane has been a member of BMEII (formerly Translational and Molecular Imaging Institute) since 2013, when she joined the Body/Cancer MRI lab as a Post-Doctoral Fellow. As a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Bane was supported by two NRSA Postdoctoral Fellowships, with the National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Disease (2016-2018), and the Cancer Biology Training Program (T32) at the Icahn School of Medicine (2014-2015). She received her doctoral and Master’s degrees in Biomedical Engineering from Northwestern University in Chicago, IL. Prior to her graduate degrees, Dr. Bane completed a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from the University of Chicago with honors. 
Under the mentorship of Dr. Bachir Taouli, Dr. Bane has been instrumental in building a successful program that utilizes advanced multiparametric (mp)MRI. She has extensive experience in data acquisition and analysis with several functional MRI modalities (dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI, diffusion-weighted MRI, phase-contrast and blood-oxygen level dependent MRI) that quantify tissue structure, perfusion and oxygenation. Her research interests include mpMRI applications for the characterization of chronic kidney disease, inflammatory bowel disease, diffuse liver disease, hepatocellular carcinoma and renal carcinoma. Through her participation in the NCI Quantitative Imaging Network and EU COST PARENCHIMA Kidney MRI collaborative projects, Dr. Bane has contributed to national and international efforts to validate and promote quantitative MRI metrics as biomarkers in clinical trials.

Dr. Bane is actively working on developing a renal mpMRI research program in collaboration with Drs. Sara Lewis and Bachir Taouli. In collaboration with Dr. Lewis, Dr. Bane plans to apply the acquisition and analysis methods she has developed to a NIH-supported, bi-center study in renal transplant fibrosis. The mpMRI parameters will be integrated with urinary biomarkers that have shown sensitivity to fibrosis, and build clinical models to predict severity of fibrosis and renal outcome within two years of imaging. During the last 3 years, Drs. Bane and Lewis have also expanded their renal mpMRI research efforts to study renal cancer, and progressive and de novo CKD in patients undergoing partial nephrectomy (PN). Their collaboration with the groups of Dr. Ketan Badani in Urology, and Dr. Amir Horowitz in Oncological Sciences/ Human Immune Monitoring Center on this project has led to the development of the multidisciplinary Kidney Cancer Research Group within Mount Sinai.