Ruth Etzioni

About

Dr. Ruth Etzioni is a biostatistician who primarily focuses on cancer screening and early detection. Much of her work is in the area of prostate and breast cancer, where she develops methods for evaluating diagnostic tests; creates mathematical models to reflect the impact of screening tests on the incidence and mortality rates of these cancers; calculates costs and benefits of preventive screening; tracks population trends with regard to screening and related behaviors and works with investigators on trial design and analysis. Dr. Etzioni also researches overdiagnoses associated with certain screening tests — when screening finds cancers that would not cause symptoms or death within a patient’s natural lifetime. She also evaluates novel cancer biomarkers and tracks patterns and outcomes of cancer care. Dr. Etzioni leads the biostatistics core for the National Cancer Institute-funded multicenter Northwest Prostate Cancer Specialized Program of Research Excellence, or SPORE, and she has a longstanding interest in researching, tracking and working to eliminate health disparities.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Gynecology
• Internal medicine
• Pathology
• Oncology
• Medical physics
• Environmental health
• Demography
• Obstetrics
• Gerontology

Selected publications

• Cervical cancer screening for individuals at average risk: 2020 guideline update from the American Cancer Society

  CA A Cancer Journal for Clinicians · 2020 · 966 citations

  The American Cancer Society (ACS) recommends that individuals with a cervix initiate cervical cancer screening at age 25 years and undergo primary human papillomavirus (HPV) testing every 5 years through age 65 years (preferred); if primary HPV testing is not available, then individuals aged 25 to 65 years should be screened with cotesting (HPV testing in combination with cytology) every 5 years or cytology alone every 3 years (acceptable) (strong recommendation). The ACS recommends that individ…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• NCCN Guidelines® Insights: Prostate Cancer Early Detection, Version 1.2023

  Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network · 2023 · 148 citations

  The NCCN Guidelines for Prostate Cancer Early Detection provide recommendations for individuals with a prostate who opt to participate in an early detection program after receiving the appropriate counseling on the pros and cons. These NCCN Guidelines Insights provide a summary of recent updates to the NCCN Guidelines with regard to the testing protocol, use of multiparametric MRI, and management of negative biopsy results to optimize the detection of clinically significant prostate cancer and m…

  DOI

• Self‐collected vaginal specimens for human papillomavirus testing and guidance on screening exit: An update to the American Cancer Society cervical cancer screening guideline

  CA A Cancer Journal for Clinicians · 2025-12-04 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  This update expands the 2020 American Cancer Society (ACS) cervical cancer screening guideline for average-risk women and individuals with a cervix who are at average risk, to include self-collection for human papillomavirus (HPV) testing and revised guidance for exiting cervical cancer screening. Self-collected vaginal specimens, a method of primary HPV testing, align with the ACS cervical cancer screening guideline. When clinician-collected cervical specimens are used for HPV testing, repeat s…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• TrajOnco: a multi-agent framework for temporal reasoning over longitudinal EHR for multi-cancer early detection

  ArXiv.org · 2026-04-12

  articleOpen access

  Accurate estimation of cancer risk from longitudinal electronic health records (EHRs) could support earlier detection and improved care, but modeling such complex patient trajectories remains challenging. We present TrajOnco, a training-free, multi-agent large language model (LLM) framework designed for scalable multi-cancer early detection. Using a chain-of-agents architecture with long-term memory, TrajOnco performs temporal reasoning over sequential clinical events to generate patient-level s…

  PublisherOA PDF

• The Vanguard Study: Assessing feasibility of conducting randomized trials of novel multi-cancer detection testsShort title: The Vanguard Study: Assessing feasibility of randomized multi-cancer detection clinical trials

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R29CA070227

  NIH · $606k · 2002

• Developing Data-Driven Cancer Researchers

  NIH · $13.6M · 1980–2029

• NIH Grant R01CA131874

  NIH · $1.1M · 2013

Frequent coauthors

• Roman Gulati

  Fred Hutch Cancer Center

  463 shared

• Scott D. Ramsey

  University of Washington

  246 shared

• Timothy R. Church

  University of Minnesota

  224 shared

• Louise C. Walter

  University of California, San Francisco

  214 shared

• Robert A. Smith

  Heart Hospital Baylor Plano

  209 shared

• Christopher R. Flowers

  The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

  208 shared

• Ya‐Chen Tina Shih

  University of California, Los Angeles

  208 shared

• Kevin C. Oeffinger

  208 shared

Labs

• Plein Center for AgingPI

Education

• PhD, Statistics

  Carnegie Mellon University

  1990

Similar researchers at University of Washington

• Jing Lih-153
• Jan Hansenh-130
• Sean D. Sullivanh-97