Dr Lucia Florescu
Biography
Lucia Florescu joined the University of Surrey in 2017 as a Lecturer in Medical Imaging and Wellcome Trust Fellow. Prior to joining Surrey, she worked in research and development at Elekta, acting as a Lead Physicist on the conception, development and implementation of cutting-edge technologies for image-guided radiation therapy and image-based radiation dosimetry. Prior to this, she was an Associate Research Scientist at Columbia University, a Research Associate at the University of Pennsylvania, a US Academy of Sciences (NRC) scholar at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, and a California Nano-Systems Institute & Hewlett Packard postdoctoral scholar at the University of California Los Angeles. She has received her PhD in Physics from the University of Toronto.
Her research focuses on developing a fundamental understanding of the interaction between radiation and biological tissue and exploiting this to devise new techniques and image reconstruction algorithms for advanced biomedical tomographic imaging.
Research
Research interests
Optical Tomography, Computed Tomography, Cone-Beam CT, Functional Imaging
Inverse Problems, Interior Tomography, Radiation Transport , Machine Learning
Image Guided Radiation Therapy, Optical-CT Gel Dosimetry
I am actively recruiting PhD students for a number of projects, including
- Polarisation-sensitive optical tomography
- Deep learning for advanced CBCT reconstruction and image-guided radiation therapy
- Cherenkov emission based optical tomography for functional image guided radiation therapy
For more information, please contact me at l.m.florescu@surrey.ac.uk
Supervision
Postgraduate research supervision
- PhD student supervision
Somayya Manzoor, "Photoacoustic imaging for the optimisation of CAR-T cell cancer therapy of soft-tissue tumours: system development ", NPL iCASE EPSRC studentship" (2021- present)
Clara Leboreiro Babe (with Prof. Jeff Bamber, ICR), "Photoacoustic imaging for the optimisation of CAR-T cell cancer therapy of soft-tissue tumours: gene expression studies” (2021-present)
Jigar Dubal, "Optical Tomography for Functional Image Guided Radiation Therapy" (2019-present)
Matthew Faulkner, "Nonreciprocal Broken-Ray Tomography" (2018-present)
- MSc project supervision
Priyam Soni, "Deep learning for CT reconstruction with incomplete data" (2022)
Martin Wormwell "Cherenkov light based dosimetry of molecular radiation therapy" (2022)
Sayorn Thangarajah, "CBCT reconstruction with incomplete data" (2022)
- Undergraduate Project supervision:
Mohammed Al-Thani, Fan-beam CT reconstruction with incomplete data (2020-2021)
Elley Bridges, "Interior Tomography" (2019-2020)
Matthew Faulkner, "Optical CT reconstruction based on incomplete data: applications to radiation dosimetry" (2017-2018)
My teaching
- Lecturer: EEE1033 Computer and Digital Logic, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Surrey
- Personal Tutor for undergraduate students.
My publications
Publications
Broken ray transforms (BRTs) are typically considered to be reciprocal, meaning that the transform is independent of the direction in which a photon travels along a given broken ray. However, if the photon can change its energy (or be absorbed and re-radiated at a different frequency) at the vertex of the ray, then reciprocity is lost. In optics, non-reciprocal BRTs are applicable to imaging problems with fluorescent contrast agents. In the case of x-ray imaging, problems with single Compton scattering also give rise to non-reciprocal BRTs. In this paper, we focus on tomographic optical fluorescence imaging and show that, by reversing the path of a photon and using the non-reciprocity of the data function, we can reconstruct simultaneously and independently all optical properties of the medium (the intrinsic attenuation coefficients at the excitation and the fluorescence frequency and the concentration of the contrast agent). Our results are also applicable to inverting BRTs that arise due to single Compton scattering.