Multiscale Monte Carlo Simulations for Radiation Therapy
Radiation transport simulations are broadly used to study many aspects of physics related to radiotherapy treatments for cancer on different length scales from patients to cells to subcellular components.
Different projects involving computational and theoretical studies of the interactions of radiation with matter are possible and may be tailored to the student's background and interests. Some projects involve use of egs_brachy, a fast Monte Carlo dose calculation for brachytherapy (developed in the Carleton Laboratory for Radiotherapy Physics), to investigate questions in brachytherapy physics (brachytherapy is a type of radiation treatment in which radioactive sources are placed next to or inside a tumour) as well as coupling advanced dose calculations with models of biological effect. Other projects involve simulation of radiation interactions at cellular or subcellular levels, including comparison of quantum and classical approaches for modelling electron transport at low energies.
Websites: http://people.physics.carleton.ca/~rthomson/
http://www.physics.carleton.ca/clrp
Contact:
Prof. Rowan Thomson:
rthomson
physics [dot] carleton [dot] ca
Raman Spectroscopy for Radiation Biodosimetry
The Laser-Assisted Medical Physics and Engineering (LAMPE) Laboratory team https://lampe.physics.carleton.ca/ develops non-invasive optical imaging techniques for rapid diagnostics, and to enable fundamental biophysics discovery.
Biodosimetry is an essential technique used to provide individual estimates of the absorbed dose of ionizing radiation through the detection of biological indicators. Current biodosimetry techniques are labour-intensive and time-consuming and hence not cost-effective. This project aims to develop a Raman spectroscopy-based technique to detect the biochemical response of blood exposed to varying doses of ionizing radiation. The student will acquire Raman spectral data from blood plasma and will analyze the data using different approaches such as multivariate analysis and machine learning for dose classification and identification of Raman biomarker bands.
Supervisor: Prof. Sangeeta Murugkar, smurugkar
physics [dot] carleton [dot] ca
Website: https://people.physics.carleton.ca/~eheath/
Dual-energy radiography implementation on a simultaneous primary-scatter x-ray imager (SPSxi)
X-ray imaging in medicine, industry, and security can be limited by low material contrast. Our lab's focus is to develop a higher-contrast imager that acquires multiple categories of x-ray information. Our current system acquires not only the conventional transmitted radiation, but also the signature of scattered radiation versus angle, out to about 10 degrees. At a basic level this is akin to combining bright field and dark-field imaging in microscopy. X-ray pencil beams are scanned over the object, the resulting radiation distributions are recorded, and point-by-point a stack of scatter images at different angles plus a transmitted image are built.
A particular medical application is to bone mineral densitometry. Conventionally, this is measured using dual-energy radiography, which makes two transmission images using very different x-ray spectra. The goal of the USRA project will be to implement and optimize dual-energy imaging on our SPSxi, thus providing at each location an extra category of information on bone health.
The project will involve experiments with x rays, data capture, and especially data correction and software development. Demonstrated ability to create new scripts in Python and Matlab would be good preparation. It will be a great opportunity to learn fundamentals of radiation physics and image capture while enhancing programming skills.
Supervisor: Prof. Paul Johns, johns
physics [dot] carleton [dot] ca