Executive Leadership

Isaac Hands, MPH

Director of Informatics Kentucky Cancer Registry
(859) 218-6227
[email protected]
Isaac Hands IH
Biography

About Isaac

Isaac Hands serves as IT Manager III and Lead Software Architect for the Kentucky Cancer Registry's Cancer Informatics division. In this senior technical role, he is responsible for overseeing the full technology stack that powers KCR's data collection, processing, and reporting systems.

As Lead Software Architect, Isaac sets technical standards, guides architectural decisions, and ensures that KCR's software systems are scalable, maintainable, and aligned with long-term strategic goals. He mentors junior developers and coordinates engineering efforts across the team.

Isaac has led the development of several major KCR platform components, including data submission systems, quality assurance pipelines, and the public-facing cancer data explorer. His work directly supports KCR's mission to provide high-quality, timely cancer data to researchers and public health officials.

Areas of Expertise

Focus Areas

Software Architecture IT Management Platform Development Team Leadership System Design
Selected Publications

Peer-Reviewed Work

2025
A Survey of NLP Methods for Oncology in the Past Decade with a Focus on Cancer Registry Applications
Hands I, Kavuluru R. — Artificial Intelligence Review, 58(10):314
Comprehensive survey of natural language processing methods applied to oncology over the past decade, with emphasis on cancer registry abstraction and coding applications.
2023
DeepPhe-CR: Natural Language Processing Software Services for Cancer Registrar Case Abstraction
Hochheiser H, Finan S, Yuan Z, Durbin EB, Jeong JC, Hands I, Rust D, et al. — JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics
Presents NLP software services designed to assist cancer registrars in automating case abstraction from clinical pathology reports, reducing manual abstraction burden.
2023
Cancer Informatics for Cancer Centers: Sharing Ideas on How to Build an AI-Ready Informatics Ecosystem for Radiation Oncology
Bitterman DS, Gensheimer MF, Hands I, et al. — JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics, 7:e2300136
Multi-institutional discussion of strategies and infrastructure needed to build artificial intelligence-ready informatics ecosystems within cancer centers, with contributions from KCR.
2022
An Expandable Informatics Framework for Enhancing Central Cancer Registries with Digital Pathology Specimens, Computational Imaging Tools, and Advanced Mining Capabilities
Foran DJ, Durbin EB, Chen W, Hands I, et al. — Journal of Pathology Informatics, 13:100167
Describes a scalable informatics framework integrating digital pathology specimens and computational imaging tools into central cancer registry workflows to enable advanced data mining.
2021
Assigning ICD-O-3 Codes to Pathology Reports Using Neural Multi-Task Training with Hierarchical Regularization
Rios A, Durbin EB, Hands I, Kavuluru R. — ACM BCB 2021
Proposes a neural multi-task learning approach with hierarchical regularization for automated assignment of ICD-O-3 diagnostic codes to cancer pathology reports.
2019
Deep Transfer Learning Across Cancer Registries for Information Extraction from Pathology Reports
Alawad M, Gao S, Qiu J, Durbin EB, Jeong JC, Hands I, Rust D, et al. — IEEE EMBS Int Conf Biomed Health Inform
Investigates transfer learning with convolutional neural networks to facilitate cross-registry knowledge sharing for automated information extraction from cancer pathology reports.
In the News

Coverage & Announcements

2015
Markey Launches App for Cancer Clinical Trials
UKNow — Apr 2015
Isaac Hands served as lead software architect for Markey Cancer Center's iPhone app featuring a searchable database of open cancer clinical trials for patients and providers.