Nola Hylton

Nola M. Hylton (born 1957) is a Professor of Radiology and Director of the Breast Imaging Research Group at the University of California, San Francisco. She pioneered the usage of magnetic resonance imaging for the detection, diagnosis, and staging of Breast Cancer by using MRIs to locate tumors and characterize the surrounding tissue. 
Early life and education.
Hylton was born in Mount Vernon, New York in 1957. Hylton studied in Mount Vernon, New York where she was one of the only black students in her physics class. Hylton studied chemical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979. She was an undergraduate fellow at Bell Labs in 1975. She joined Stanford University for her PhD, earning a doctorate in applied physics in 1985, becoming one of a handful of black women with doctorates in that period. Here she worked on analytical techniques to evaluate NMR imaging contrast, which is used in assessing MRI's. She developed a hierarchical processing algorithms to characterise the tissues. In her early career she was part of an international trial that compared two breast cancer screening methods, using MRI and mammographies. Hylton was appointed group leader of the working group on Breast MRI systems.
Research and career.
Hylton designs MRI biomarkers, which allow Hylton to evaluate how breast cancer responds to treatment. In the 2013 "Investigation of Serial studies to Predict Your Therapeutic Response with Imaging And molecular analysis" (I-SPY TRIAL), Hylton developed workstations that allow physicians to perform analysis of breast MRI scans. Hylton worked with Hologic to develop software to measure the volume of tumours and analyse images automatically. She expanded the software to include diffusion-weighted imaging (DW-MRI), which helps assess the response of tumours in patients undergoing preoperative chemotherapy. She was principal investigator for ACRIN 6657 and 6698 (I-SPY 2).
She is particularly interested in dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI). The hologic software DCE-MRI allowed Hylton to monitor breast cancer response in real-time. The software was FDA IDE approved in 2010. Hylton demonstrated in 2010 that MRI could be used to predict how women will respond to neoadjuvant therapy. DCE-MRI and DW-MRI provide extra functional information as the MRI becomes sensitive to the vascularity of tumours. Her recent work has identified that PET and MRI can be used to personalise the treatment of breast cancer.
Hylton served as the principal investigator for the National Cancer Institute International Breast MRI Consortium. She serves on the University of California, San Francisco Diversity and Inclusion committee. 
Her current research focuses on the development and evaluation of MRI techniques for characterizing breast cancer and assessing/monitoring their responses to treatment. 