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Rensselaer Researchers Awarded NIH Grant To Develop Virtual Patient Models Rensselaer is leading a team of researchers awarded a three-year, $2.1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop 3-D virtual patient models that will more accurately compute radiation doses for CT imaging, nuclear medicine, and radiation treatment of cancer patients. The grant is funded by the National Cancer Institute, part of NIH.
"Dr. Xu's research aims to better understand the effects of radiation interaction on the human body using virtual patients, thereby enabling radiologists to use safer and more effective doses of radiation to image and treat actual patients," said Omkaram "Om" Nalamasu, vice president for research at Rensselaer. "His work is an example of the advanced imaging and computational modeling research being conducted at Rensselaer and how it is collaboratively applied to address pressing medical and healthcare problems." In 2000, Xu and his students at Rensselaer created Visible Photographic Man (VIP-Man), an advanced computer model that simulates in 3-D how radiation affects the organs and tissues in the human body. The project combined precise organ and tissue anatomy with Monte Carlo computer codes to simulate the interactions of various radiation types, such as photons, electrons, neutrons, and protons, within the body. The research on VIP-Man, which was funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Library of Medicine, contained three billion voxels of medical image data in a computer code that formulates a virtual patient. In collaboration with the interdisciplinary team, Xu plans to expand on VIP-Man in the new project by creating a library of additional 3-D models that represent virtual female and male patients of various ages and body sizes. "Currently accepted methods in radiation protection and nuclear medicine do not realistically consider patient variations in age and body size, resulting in very large miscalculations in the true radiation dose to the patient," said Xu. "Our project aims to bring about a paradigm change by creating a realistic patient model library and related computational tools that will facilitate image processing, simulation, and radiation dose measurement for various clinical diagnostic and therapeutic procedures." Read the press release |
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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), 110 8th St., Troy, NY 12180. (518) 276-6000 |