This is a past event.

Eric Morris from Washington University School of Medicine will present at this week's Physics Colloquium. Please join this in-person presentation at 4 p.m., Thursday (Sep 7) in Fisher Hall 139.

Medical Physics: To Spare Or To Treat The Heart, That Is The Question

ABSTRACT:

    A Medical Physicist has several responsibilities. Most involve the use of radiation or radiant energy in medical applications. Their clinical duties involve ensuring optimal patient treatments, conducting quality assurance on equipment, and establishing a safe environment for patients and staff. They are also accountable for addressing clinical failures, developing new technologies for advancing care, and training the next generation of clinicians.

    A current issue in radiation oncology is the appropriateness of irradiating the heart. Increased risks of radiation-induced heart disease have been linked to doses from thoracic radiation therapy. However, we cannot currently consider these cardiac structures in radiation therapy planning due to poor visualization on diagnostic imaging. Conversely, there has been a recent effort to treat major cardiac arrhythmias, such as ventricular tachycardia (VT), through radioablation. However, manual delineation of the VT target is incredibly complex and time-consuming.

    This work presents a solution for generating automatic delineations of dosimetrically important cardiac structures through the use of artificial intelligence. Additionally, a model will be introduced that can automatically provide the American Heart Association 17 segments of the left ventricle with the aid of a mathematical dimension reduction technique called principal component analysis.

Whether we are sparing or treating the heart, the tools created through studies such as these will allow clinicians to accurately delineate cardiac structures and determine the effects of varying radiation levels through clinical trials and retrospective studies.

BIO:

    Eric Morris has a Doctorate in Medical Physics and is certified by the American Board of Radiology. He is an Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology at the Washington University School of Medicine, one of the largest Cancer Centers in the United States. Dr. Morris’s research focuses on cardiac radioablation and using artificial intelligence for automatic segmentation on both Magnetic resonance and computed tomography imaging datasets for improving the quality and efficiency of online and offline radiation therapy treatments. Before joining the faculty at Washington University, he completed residency training at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Morris earned his PhD in Medical Physics from Wayne State University while conducting his PhD research at Henry Ford Hospital. Originally from Michigan, he completed his undergraduate studies in Physics at Michigan Technological University.