Adaptive Breast Radiation Therapy using Modelling of Tissue Mechanics

When?

Wednesday 3 October 2012, 14:00 to 15:00

Where?

CVSSP Seminar Room (40bAB05)

Open to:

Public, Staff, Students

Speaker:

Prabhjot Juneja, Institute of Cancer Research

Abstract:
The objective of this project is to develop adaptive breast radiotherapy based upon tissue modelling. The goal is to use modelling of tissue changes based on the finite element method (FEM) and information from the planning computed tomography (CT), to quantify changes in the breast during the course of radiotherapy. This understanding can be used to determine the need for adapting radiotherapy (ART, i.e. re-imaging and re-planning). For realistic modelling, breast tissues have to be segmented into fibroglandular and fatty tissue and assigned suitable elastic properties. Therefore, the project started with a study to validate and compare breast tissue segmentation methods. This segmentation study brought out the problem with the validation using multiple experts’ outlines, a validation index has been developed to address this issue. The segmentation study identified that the sparseness of the distribution of fibroglandular tissue significantly affects the segmentation accuracy. A study of the fibroglandular tissue distribution has been conducted. This study evaluated texture features for the identification of imaging data which are inherently difficult to segment. An automated tool to assess these sparseness distributions would be useful. One way to design such a tool is to use the texture features, and then machine learning techniques, such as support vector machine (SVM), to classify the tissue distribution as sparse or non-sparse. Currently breast FEM models are under development. After validation, these models would be used, for registration, to quantify target volume changes and their effect on the treatment and thereby predict the requirement for re-planning. This provides a means for adaptive breast radiotherapy.

Bio:
My Under-graduate (2003-2007):  Bachelor in Technology in Engineering Physics from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India
Masters (2007-2008): 1 year Erasmus Mundus Masters in Modelling and Simulation at University of Rome, La Sapienza and ENS Lyon.
Job Experience (2008-2009): Market Research at ZS Associates Pune, India
PhD Studies (2009 onwards): Currently am at the end of 3rd year of PhD at Joint Dept. Physics,  Institute of Cancer Research (Sutton Site), under Prof. Phil Evans and Dr. Emma Harris