Medical Physics

Medical Physics is offered to students who have undergraduate training in physics, engineering, computer science, or related physical sciences who would like to establish a career in medical physics research or clinical service. Students in medical physics experience a wide spectrum of training activities to complement their research, including coursework in radiological physics, imaging, anatomy and physiology, seminars, journal clubs, and clinical rotations.

Research Topics

The research focus of Medical Physics is the development of cutting-edge imaging and therapeutic tools to help cancer radiotherapy treatment. Examples include:

Medical image reconstruction and application in radiotherapy
Radiotherapy treatment planning and adaptive replanning
Deep learning and Artificial Intelligence for radiotherapy
High-performance computing for radiotherapy, such as Monte Carlo radiation transport simulation
Modeling of organ motions and development of motion management strategies
Development of advanced clinical and preclinical imaging and therapeutic approaches
Modeling radiobiological phenomena and understanding the mechanisms

Accreditation

The Medical Physics track is accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Medical Physics Education Programs (CAMPEP), which recognizes that our training has met CAMPEP requirements. This is required for students who would like to establish a career in clinical medical physics. The accreditation allows graduates to apply for CAMPEP-accredited residency training and pursue board certification from the American Board of Radiology.

Director

Research Interests: 3D/4D CT/CBCT reconstruction and analysis, 4D MRI reconstruction, artificial intelligence and automation in radiation therapy, biomechanical modeling and finite element analysis, deformable registration and its application in image-guided radiation therapy, radiotherapy dose calculation and plan optimization

Faculty

Research Interests: Cloud and GPU-based high-performance computing in medical physics and imaging; automatic radiotherapy treatment planning; adaptive radiotherapy; image-guided radiotherapy; low-dose and dynamic-cone-beam CT

Research Interests: Adaptive radiation therapy; treatment-plan optimization; radiation-dose calculations

Research Interests: Radiation therapy treatment planning, optimization techniques and algorithms, artificial intelligence technology development and applications

Research Interests: Proton Therapy, Artificial Intelligence, PET and PET/MRI Imaging, FLASH

Research Interests: Tomographic image reconstruction; cone-beam computed tomography; image-guided radiation therapy; medical imaging processing

Research Interests: Biomedical optics, In Vivo cell tracking, Optical tomography-guided radiation therapy and Ultra-high dose rate irradiation

Research Interests: Bioinformatics, Biostatistics, Machine learning, Immunogenomics, and Tumor genomics

Research Interests: Statistical genetics and statistical computations

Associate Faculty

These faculty members do not accept graduate students. They participate in teaching, co-mentoring, exam and dissertation committees, and all other program activities.

Research Interests: Adaptive radiation therapy, MRI-based radiation therapy

Research Interests: Evaluate the use of newly designed biodegradable stints to treat pulmonary artery stenosis

Research Interests:Tissue-response modeling in radiation therapy; brachytherapy

Research Interests: General psychiatry, aging and geriatric issues, new applications of lead placement in ECT and novel treatments of major depressive disorder including magnetic seizure therapy, transcranial magnetic stimulation, deep brain stimulation, and vagus nerve stimulation

Research Interests: Tissue-response modeling in radiation therapy; stereotactic radiation therapy

Research Interests: High-performance computing; infrastructure for radiation therapy; radiobiological effects