University of Maryland School of Medicine

A multi-institutional journal club (MIJC) was introduced by the AAPM’s Working Group on Multi-Institutional Journal Clubs for Residency Programs (WGJCRP) in 2021. As of 2022, 40% of therapy programs were participating. The MIJC program was intended to connect...

Cone-beam CT (CBCT) is routinely used for image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT); however, in the optimal frequency of CBCT varies across patients and treatment sites, affecting imaging dose, workflow efficiency, and clinical consistency. This study aims to de...

Brachytherapy is a standard component in cervical cancer treatment. Venezia applicators allow addition of limited needle positions to tandem and ovoid procedures, but needle selection and insertion depth largely rely on physician judgement, requiring some lev...

Proton dose calculation is sensitive to the metal wires, which are placed on the patient's skin during CT simulation to precisely outline the location of surgical scars and the intended radiation treatment field borders. In order to avoid the dose uncertainti...

To develop prognostic models integrating delta radiomics from prostate-specific membrane antigen positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PSMA-PET/CT) and dosiomics with clinical variables to predict metastasis-free survival (MFS) in patients with lo...

Accurate auto-contouring is essential for efficient prostate radiotherapy, particularly in image-guided and adaptive workflows, where contour quality influences clinical decision-making. This study quantitatively evaluates Radformation auto-contouring perform...

Four-dimensional cone-beam computed tomography (4D-CBCT) enables visualization of respiration-induced anatomical motion but suffers from degraded image quality due to sparse-view acquisition. This study proposes a deep learning-based approach combining interp...

The bladder is kept full during prostate proton therapy to push the small and large intestines out of the radiation field and maintain a consistent position for the bladder and nearby pelvic organs. However, it is a challenge to keep a regular bladder volume...

Electron beam therapy has been used for treating shallow tumors such as skin cancers and postoperative keloids because of its favorable surface‑dose characteristics and simple clinical workflow. These treatments are often delivered with a single field and vis...

To integrate the first nozzle-mounted, quad-camera prompt gamma imaging (PGI) system on a clinical proton therapy gantry and to evaluate its efficacy for proton range verification under realistic treatment delivery conditions.

Regulatory inspections for multi-site radiation oncology programs are traditionally resource-intensive, requiring approximately 1.0 hour/linac of on-site review. This study quantifies the impact of a centralized, cloud-based governance model designed to separ...

Understanding of medical physics is essential for safe and effective radiation oncology practice. This study evaluates current instructional practices for physics education in radiation oncology physician residency programs following the release of the AAPM/A...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has undergone transformative advancements, revolutionizing medical imaging and radiation therapy with unprecedented precision and efficiency. Breakthroughs in agentic AI, foundation models, and interpretable AI have significantly...

Therapy Physics

To introduce a conditional Wavelet Diffusion framework incorporating depth-wise convolution for efficient high-resolution 3D medical image synthesis, and to evaluate its performance on MRI cross-modality translation and CT texture generation for realistic dig...

Deep learning–based three‑dimensional (3D) dose prediction models are increasingly becoming viable for radiotherapy workflows. However, their sensitivity to small variations in input data remains insufficiently characterized. This study presents a framework t...

This study aims to illuminate how HyperSight CBCT compares to conventional CBCT and planning CT in terms of radiomic features, applying statistical methods such as the Kruskal-Wallis H Test and the Intra-Class Correlation Coefficient (ICC).

Cyberattacks pose a growing threat to the continuity of radiation therapy services. Establishing contingency plans (CPs) is critical for rapid recovery post-cyberattack and for maintaining operational resilience. However, the extent of awareness, perceived im...

Lattice radiotherapy (LRT) produces steep vertex–valley gradients, making 2D gamma-based QA insufficient for clinically relevant 3D dose–volume endpoints. We propose an MRI polymer gel–based 3D DVH verification workflow for VMAT-LRT and assess feasibility and...

In vivo dosimetry is essential for treatment verification and patient safety. Although commercial radiochromic film systems are established for photons, proton therapy adds complexity because film response is energy dependent and clinical beams are typically...

HyperSight cone-beam CT (HS-CBCT) on C-arm linacs may enable CBCT-based replanning by improving image quality, HU fidelity, and field-of-view (FOV). We evaluated clinical feasibility and dose-recalculation agreement using patient data.

Proton pencil beam scanning (PBS) offers excellent dose conformity but remains limited by delivery inefficiency associated with energy layer switching time. A programmable energy modulation filter (PEMF) was developed to enable single-energy proton PBS delive...

Pulmonary fluid changes often necessitate treatment replanning; however, associated mass variations compromise deformable dose accumulation (DDA) and complicate its evaluation. Accurate estimation of cumulative dose and its associated uncertainty is therefore...

Radiomics-enabled adaptive radiotherapy depends on on-treatment imaging that maintains CT-like quantitative biomarkers. We evaluated whether HyperSight CBCT preserves planning-CT radiomic biomarkers more faithfully than conventional CBCT in pelvic radiotherap...

Radiomic survival models often have substantial class imbalance, which can distort patient ranking and reduce the reliability of predicted survival probabilities. This study evaluated commonly used imbalance-handling strategies and whether their effects chang...

To determine whether adjusting MLC blocking of the left anterior descending artery (LAD) in left breast radiotherapy plans can reduce heart and LAD doses and improve plan robustness while maintaining desired target coverage.

To evaluate how varying the noise-suppression level and reducing the imaging exposure affects contrast-detail performance and other image quality metrics in image-guided radiation therapy.

To test whether HyperSight CBCT (HS-CBCT) improves consistency of longitudinal radiomics with planning CT versus conventional CBCT in pelvic radiotherapy.

Proton head-and-neck (HN) patients often experience target volume changes. Our investigation of daily CBCTs showed the changes from swelling to shrinkage happening usually within one week. Offline adaptation takes about one week to create a replan and thus ve...

Secondary radiation from proton therapy can induce activation in beamline components, range shifters, and phantoms/patients. Rapid identification and localization of activated regions are critical for radiation safety, compliance, and workflow efficiency. We...

Breast patients treated with intensity-modulated proton therapy (IMPT) often experience more severe skin dose toxicity compared to those with photon 3DCRT. Here we quantitatively estimated the LET-dependent RBE (LET-RBE) vs clinically used constant RBE=1.1 fo...

Teaching medical physics to radiation oncology residents is challenging, given their limited foundational training in physics, competing clinical demands, and inconsistent motivation beyond preparation for the ABR physics examination. Meanwhile, clinical medi...

Daily cone-beam CT (CBCT) is widely used in adaptive proton therapy; however, scatter artifacts can degrade image quality and introduce proton dose calculation inaccuracies. We developed a region-of-interest (ROI)–guided Swin-Transformer deep learning (DL) ne...

To commission and clinically implement a robust radiochromic film dosimetry workflow for PBS proton therapy, providing a practical solution for small-field patient-specific QA, in-vivo dose verification, and WET-based range assessment when dedicated in-vivo a...

With the number of proton centers increasing, each facing intermittent downtime or need for renovations. Developing optimal approaches to maintain uninterrupted treatment is essential to preserve clinical outcomes. This study outlines key risk factors, workfl...

Model the therapeutic effects of chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and chemoradiotherapy to study the heterogeneous responses of pancreatic cancer patient-derived tumor organoids (PDTOs).

Accurate radiotherapy delivery requires precise knowledge of soft-tissue anatomy at the time of treatment, particularly for abdominal targets affected by respiration, peristalsis, and inter-fractional anatomical changes. Current clinical systems provide limit...

Ultrafast ultrasound (UFUS) enables imaging of blood flow, functional dynamics, cardiac motion, and real-time treatment verification. UFUS is often acquired using high frame-rate single plane-wave imaging (SPWI), which has limited image quality due to the sin...

With recent shifts in the federal funding landscape, many investigators are facing new challenges in supporting their research. An analysis of 2025 NIH data reveals a steep decline year-over-year in new grants awarded to AAPM members, raising serious concerns...

Therapy Physics

Imaging lies at the core of stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS), defining the geometric and biological precision required to safely deliver ablative doses to intracranial targets. Rapid advances in image acquisition, integration, and analysis are transforming eve...

Protoacoustic (PA) imaging enables real-time verification of proton dose deposition by reconstructing 3D initial pressure maps from acoustic signals generated during proton delivery. However, in practical treatment settings, detectors cannot fully surround th...

Radiomics models often exhibit unreliable performance and substantial variation across institutions. One aspect that has not been examined thoroughly is how parameter settings—such as normalization scale, outlier handling, and bin width—affect downstream resu...

To assess dual-layer DECT-derived SPR images for proton therapy by identifying tissue-specific deviations versus SECT, validating discrepancies using measured SPR in biological tissues, and evaluating dosimetric impact of DECT-based robust optimization.

A key barrier to clinical efficacy of functional lung sparing radiation therapy (RT) is that current functional-sparing strategies fail to account for airway paths and connected lung parenchymal sub-volumes in conjunction – an approach that, we previously sho...

This study proposes a vertex-wise Isodose Structure (IS)-based framework to evaluate the 3D geometric accuracy of Lattice Radiotherapy (LRT) dose distributions by decoupling geometric misalignment from dose-dependent volumetric distortion, enabling vertex-spe...