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COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY
Tracking Tumors For Treatment
Patients who require radiation treatment may soon
have less of their healthy tissue exposed to the harmful procedure.
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Rich Radke is using advanced algorithms
to create more accurate images of tumors from the time of
diagnosis to the time of treatment. Radke, assistant professor
of electrical, computer, and systems engineering, is collaborating
with the Department of Radiation Therapy at the Massachusetts
General Hospital in Boston.
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Rich Radke is using advanced algorithms to create
more accurate images of tumors from the time of diagnosis to the
time of treatment. Radke, assistant professor of electrical, computer,
and systems engineering, is collaborating with the Department
of Radiation Therapy at the Massachusetts General Hospital in
Boston.
According to Radke, doctors can accurately aim
radiation beams wherever they want, but the problem is finding
the exact location within the body that needs to be irradiated.
Variations in a patient’s breathing, eating
habits, or any movement can change the location of the tumor and
make it difficult to pinpoint its location.
Often doctors will irradiate a larger-than-necessary
area because they must take into account the movement of the patient
and the tumor during X-rays or MRIs.
Radke hopes to “train” computers to
recognize these changes and produce pinpoint accuracy in hitting
a moving target.
Advances in computing technology over the past
five years now make this possible. Radke envisions doctors using
a high-speed computer system that reads the images, analyzes them
through algorithms, and sends an accurate location directly to
the radiation beam.
Radke hopes to soon be able to match up two-dimensional
images (such as CAT scans) and three-dimensional images (such
as MRIs). He hopes in the following year to be able to match images
that take into account regular breathing patterns. The work is
part of the Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems,
a National Science Foundation cross-disciplinary engineering research
center.
CONTACT: Theresa Bourgeois, (518) 276-2840,
bourgt@rpi.edu
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