Title:

Emission Guided Radiation Therapy

Speaker:

Dr. Samuel Mazin

Affiliation:

RefleXion Medical

When:

Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 11:00:00 AM   Add to Calendar

Where:

Boggs Building, Room 3-47, 3rd FL

Host:

Dr. Lei Zhu
lei.zhu@me.gatech.edu
(404) 385-3882

Abstract

Late-stage cancer patients have limited treatment options due to the difficulties of treating many disease sites. Real-time positron emission tomography (PET) during radiotherapy could allow for systematic multi-target treatments, however PET imaging has to date not been incorporated to guide radiation delivery, primarily due to the low count statistics that are a fundamental limitation of the modality. Due to imaging times on the order of minutes, it is very difficult to use PET imaging for real-time radiotherapy guidance to compensate for respiratory or other physiologic motion. We have proposed a means to use PET signals in a real-time fashion, circumventing the imaging process, by dynamically responding to individually detected emissions with radiotherapy beamlets along the emission paths. In this presentation we show a feasible geometry based on a ring-gantry linear accelerator system with incorporated PET detector arrays. We also present simulated and experimental results from a PET motion phantom in a GE Discovery system, demonstrating the principle of emission guided radiation therapy.

Biography

Sam Mazin is the President and co-founder of RefleXion Medical, a company that is developing the first PET-guided radiation therapy system. While a Postdoc in Radiology at Stanford University, Sam was selected by the Kauffman Foundation as one of thirteen postdocs in the nation to commercialize promising innovations. His prior research at Stanford was focused on the design of a novel X-ray computed tomography system, resulting in several journal papers and a patent, as well as the Joel Drillings Award from the American Heart Association. His work on a PET-based algorithm received the prestigious Cum Laude award from the international SPIE medical imaging society. He has been invited to speak about his research by the American Heart Association, GE's Global Research Center, Accuray and Varian Medical Systems. In 2008 Sam participated in the Stanford Graduate School of Business Summer Institute for Entrepreneurship, where he was one of five participants named a GlaxoSmithKline Garnier Fellow. Sam holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford and a BASc in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada.

Notes

Refreshments will be served.