University of Miami

Leptomeningeal metastases (LM), or the spread of cancer to the cerebrospinal fluid, is a neurologically devastating manifestation of cancer. Without treatment survival is limited to months, and few effective therapies exist. A randomized phase II study recent...

Measurement based QA is required in clinical practice due to the delivery complexity of IMRT. Many factors can affect measurement accuracy and QA passing rate. In this study, we aimed to investigate the impact of beam hardening and energy dependency of detect...

Magnetic resonance-guided set up images (MRg-images) acquired prior to daily treatment provide longitudinal image series that could contain treatment response information. The purpose of this work is to compare delta radiomics texture features (DF) extracted...

The Varian Ethos intelligent optimization engine (IOE) automates the generation of non-overlapping optimization structures and resolves planning conflicts via a prioritized goal hierarchy. While designed to minimize manual intervention, the influence of user-...

Varian Ethos 2.0 recently introduced High-Fidelity (HF) Mode, featuring a 1.25 mm dose grid designed for small-target SRS/SBRT. While the Intelligent Optimization Engine (IOE) automates plan generation, the impact of user-defined optimization structures—speci...

To evaluate and compare the incidence of xerostomia (“dry mouth”) in head and neck (H&N) cancer patients treated with intensity-modulated proton therapy (IMPT) and intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT), across unilateral (UT) and bilateral (BT) treatme...

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...

Metal artifacts caused by implanted gold fiducial markers remain a significant challenge in cone-beam CT (CBCT) imaging for prostate radiotherapy. Their high attenuation generates severe streaks and image distortions that decrease overall image quality. This...

To develop a slice-specific CT organ dose library using Monte Carlo radiation transport simulations on a set of newborn, infant, and toddler (NIT) computational phantoms containing newly developed age-specific skeletal tissue models. This dose library forms t...

Radiomics, a field of quantitative characterization of tumor heterogeneity and has shown promise for predicting treatment response in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Delta-radiomics extends this approach by capturing temporal changes in radiomic features (RFs...

Proton therapy’s ability to spare normal tissue generally lowers complications, making it an attractive treatment option for head and neck (HN) cancer. Yet, oral mucositis, one of the most frequent and clinically relevant toxicities, occurs in approximately 6...

Large multi-institution healthcare networks often operate diverse fleets of CT scanners while sharing the same radiology practice for clinical interpretation. Variability in CT protocols, quality control (QC) processes, and dose thresholds across separate ins...

Radiation segmentectomy using yttrium-90 (Y‑90) transarterial radioembolization (TARE) is an established treatment for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), with the goal of achieving complete tumor necrosis through delivery of high doses (>400 Gy). Despite widespr...

In prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA)-targeted radiopharmaceutical therapy for metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer, salivary glands often receive unintended high absorbed doses and are considered dose-limiting organs. For radiopharmaceutica...

Proton therapy plans are optimized by relating the delivered dose to an equivalent photon dose using the Relative Biological Effectiveness (RBE). Clinically, a constant RBE of 1.1 is assumed, despite evidence that RBE varies along the proton beam path. Accura...

Consistent bladder filling is a critical determinant of dosimetric accuracy and organ-at-risk (OAR) sparing in prostate radiotherapy (RT). This retrospective study evaluates whether the implementation of a dedicated ultrasound (US) scanner to assess bladder v...

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is resource-intensive and prone to subjective bias. While Radiation Oncology Incident Learning System (RO-ILS) collects vast data, extracting insights from unstructured narratives remains a bottleneck. Large language models (LLMs) of...

To introduce and apply a analytical-driven robustness evaluation framework, Robust Analysis Treatment Score (RATS), for systematic comparison of intensity-modulated proton therapy (IMPT) and intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) treatment plans for pro...

To investigate the incidence of radiation necrosis (RN) after proton therapy (PT) in low-grade brain tumors and characterize RN temporal evolution.

Portable MRI (pMRI) systems provide a compact, cryogen-free, and infrastructure-light platform for point-of-care and in-house clinical and preclinical imaging without patient or animal transport. However, the low magnetic field strength of pMRI inherently lim...

Low-intensity, nonthermal electric and magnetic field–based therapies have emerged as effective clinical treatments for glioblastoma (Optune and Oncomagnetic devices). Here, we investigate the feasibility of concurrent radiotherapy (RT) with low-intensity fie...

Therapy Physics

To evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in performing root cause analysis (RCA) of radiation oncology incidents using narrative reports from the Radiation Oncology Incident Learning System (RO-ILS), and to assess their potential...