ASTRO Award Winner

(2017-10-13) Congratulations to Leith Rankine (PhD student) for being awarded TRAVEL AWARD (Radiation Physics Category) at the ASTRO 2017 Annual Meeting, scoring highest in the abstract review process and judged by the Scientific Program Directors to reflect the highest level of scientific quality and innovation. In his work tiled “Is Lung Ventilation Imaging a Reasonable Surrogate for Gas Exchange? Implications for Functionally Guided Radiation Therapy Planning”, Leith and his colleagues used a novel Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) technique to measure and compare spatial distributions of lung ventilation and gas exchange in humans. The Annual Meeting Travel Award recognizes outstanding research by early-career scientists, biologists and physicists. Lead authors of 15 high-scoring abstracts selected for the meeting will receive awards of $1,000 to support travel to the meeting. Read abstract here.

Fall 2017 Open House

(2017-10-13) The Duke Medical Physics Program welcomed prospective students during the annual Fall Open House on October 6, 2017. The Open House began with informative introductions by the Program Director Dr. Samei and DGS Dr. Kapadia. Leith Rankine (PhD student) also shared some of his experience in the program through a “Why Duke” presentation. This year, a student showcase session was added to the agenda to allow more interactions between current students and prospective applicants. In addition, guests were able to enjoy Duke’s historic West Campus and sightsee popular places around Durham (Ninth Street, Brightleaf, and Downtown to name a few) during our student-led city-campus tour. The Open House concluded with imaging and radiation oncology facility tours at the state-of-the-art Duke University Hospital Cancer Center, hosted by faculty members of the program.

Announcing Distinguished Lecture

Donald Cool, PhD, Electric Power Research Institute
Technical Executive - Radiation Safety
"The System of Radiological Protection: What is it"
Oct 26, 2017; 2:30 PM; Bryan Research Bld. Auditorium
Reception and townhall discussion will follow

 

New Study in Radiation Dosage

(2017-09-29) A newly-published study by Dr. Ehsan Samei (Radiology), Dr. Xiang Li (Class 2010), and Dr. Donald Frush (Radiology) offers a new framework which allows physicians and imaging developers to tailor radiation dose to achieve a quantitative target of image quality of pediatric patients. The result is important as body size is a particularly dominant factor for pediatric patients in CT imaging considering the wide range of age group. In the future, this methodology can be used to optimize individual scan parameters and provide for consistent diagnostic performance across the broad range of children body sizes. (Read more)

 

Life and Evolution as Physics

(2017-09-29) To start the Distinguished Lecture series for the 2017-2018 academic year, Dr. Adrian Bejan (Mechanical Engineering), gave a thought-provoking talk revolving around the Constructal Law, titled “Life and Evolution as Physics.” Constructal Law, which simply states “For a finite-size system to persist in time (to live), it must evolve in such a way that it provides easier access to the imposed currents that flow through it,” was first introduced by Dr. Bejan in 1996. Interestingly, it has been able to consistently describe many phenomena, including airport design, spread of city population and successfully predicted the 2008 Beijing Olympics outcomes.

The lecture was immediately followed by speaker meet and greet as well as a student-led townhall discussion, in which students were able to ask Dr. Bejan follow-up questions regarding his talk and career directly. The next distinguished lecture is planned for October 26, 2017 with speaker Dr. Donald Cool of the Radiation Safety Electric Power Research Institute.