Health Physics Society Awards 2018

Photo courtesy of Brianna Smiley. Pictured from left to right: "back row" Innocent Tsorxe, Dr. Chu Wang (PhD’16), Justin Raudabaugh (PhD’22), "front row" Brianna Smiley (MS’19), Dr. Terry Yoshizumi (Advisor), Dr. Bria Moore (PhD’18)

(2018-07-20) Dr. Bria Moore (PhD’18), Justin Raudabaugh (PhD’22), and Brianna Smiley (MS’19), received Travel Awards for the Health Physics Society (HPS) Annual Meeting that took place in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 14 -19, 2018.  During the meeting, Dr. Bria Moore presented two talks titled “Development of Novel Nano-Fiber Optic Detector Technology for Real-time Detection of Iodine-131 Beta Energy” and “Energy Dependence of TLD-100 Dosimeters in Broad-Beam kV X-Ray Beams.”

Contrast-Enhanced CT Grant

(2018-07-20) Dr. Ehsan Samei’s laboratory recently received a two-year grant of $238,000 from Bracco Imaging to conduct a study on contrast-enhanced CT exam protocol. Optimizing and personalizing contrast-enhanced CT exams is an important task considering that more than 60% of clinical CT imaging involves the use of iodinated contrast materials. Variability in factors such as body habitus, gender, age, and cardiac output can also significantly affect the outcome of the scan. Thus, to address this problem, the project will systemically evaluate the impact of contrast material concentration on dose exposure and image quality, in addition to developing a set of validated correlations between enhancement result and patient attributes.

ISMRM 2018 Meeting Awards

(2018-06-22) Devin Willey (MS 2018), Jonathan Cuthbertson (MS 2018), and Julia Bresticker (MS 2019), advisor Dr. Trong-Kha Truong (Radiology) have been honored with the prestigious Magna Cum Laude ISMRM Merit Awards at The International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) Annual Meeting, which was held in Paris, France, on June 16-21, 2018. Magna Cum Laude ISMRM Merit Awards are given to Trainee members whose abstracts score in the top 15% within a major subject review category.  The winning abstracts titled “Application of integrated parallel reception, excitation, and shimming (iPRES) for signal loss recovery in fMRI.” by Willey DA, Darnell D, Song AW, Truong TK, and “The iPRES-W AIR coil: A flexible RF coil for simultaneous MR image acquisition, wireless communication, and localized. B0 shimming.” by Cuthbertson, J, Darnell, D, Bresticker, J, Stomont, R, Robb, F, Song, AW, Truong, TK.

AAPM 2018 Science Highlights

(2018-06-22) Our recent graduates, Dr. Wendy Harris (PhD 2018) and Michelle Rokni (MS 2018), were recently selected to have their abstracts and presentations be featured in the AAPM 2018 Science Highlights.

Dr. Harris will have two featured presentations: “Predicting Real-Time 3D Deformation Field Maps (DFM) Based On Volumetric Cine MRI (VC-MRI) and Artificial Neural Networks for On-Board 4D Target Tracking/Gating” and “Volumetric Cine MRI (VC-MRI) Using Motion Modeling, Free-Form Deformation and Multi-Slice Undersampled 2D Cine MRI Reconstructed with Spatio-Temporal Low-Rank Decomposition” where she investigated different methods to improve target tracking and localization in radiation therapy using VC-MRI.

Michelle Rokni and collaborators designed a novel platform using NanoFOD detectors to allow for real time tracking of delivered dose during HDR treatments. This system has the potential to detect gross errors in HDR treatment delivery that could otherwise remain undetected. Michelle will have a presentation titled “It is about (real) time to verify HDR treatments: Duke solution using nano-fiber optic detector.”

AAPM 2018 SPARE Challenge

(2018-06-08) Dr. Lei Ren's lab (MedPhys PhD'09, Radiation Oncology) was recently selected as one of the top five teams for the Sparse-view Reconstruction Challenge for Four-dimensional Cone-beam CT (SPARE) Challenge, organized by AAPM and researchers at the University of Sydney. This year’s competition challenges participant to reconstruct CT images using under-sampled data to explore the possibility of high quality 4D CBCT while sparing patients the additional scan time and dose that is currently used in the clinics. Dr. Ren’s team will be one of the four teams being invited to present their technique at the “AAPM Grand Challenges Symposium: Image Reconstruction for 4D-CBCT” at the annual meeting this year. In addition, the result will also be emphasized in a future paper summarizing the challenge.