Mayo Clinic

To develop a phantom for evaluating CT gout identification and determine phantom longevity.

To address the labor-intensive nature of Deformable Image Registration (DIR) QA quantitatively through the use of independent software and in-house scripting for lung and Head & Neck (H&N) sites for clinical use.

For BgRT treatment on the RefleXion X1 linac, patients must meet stringent criteria regarding the proximity and 18F-FDG activity of OARs near the target. The next-generation X2 platform has an increased PET field of view, and new planning, PET detection, and...

X-ray angiography systems are used to diagnose and treat pediatric congenital heart disease. Among the substantial variability in this patient population is that patient weight ranges from <1 kg premature infants to large adolescents. Given that the X-ray sca...

Treating multiple oligometastatic lesions typically requires creating separate SBRT plans, resulting in longer treatment time and an increase in planning complexity. In this work we evaluate biology-guided multi-target treatment (MTT) approach for a PET-linea...

Plastic scintillators offer fast data acquisition, small sensitive volumes suitable for small field dosimetry, and tissue equivalence, making them well suited for LINAC commissioning. This study characterizes the BluePhysics (BP) plastic scintillator for rapi...

Direct-to-treatment (DTT) streamlines simulation, planning, QA and treatment into same-day, risk-managed pathways that start from diagnostic imaging or treatment-unit imaging. Clinical and physics evidence now supports multiple entry points: diagnostic-CT bas...

Therapy Physics

To develop a global database of medical physics initiatives in support of a sustainable and equitable collaborative ecosystem that minimizes resource duplication and inefficiencies across stakeholders.

Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology Physics

Proton therapy offers distinct dosimetric advantages for reirradiation (reRT) due to its finite range and Bragg peak, allowing potential tumor dose escalation with reduced normal tissue exposure compared to photon-based reRT. However, these benefits come with...

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...

Education is a core professional responsibility for medical physicists, yet most receive limited formal training in pedagogy or instructional design. Recognizing this gap, the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) established the Community of...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly integrated into clinical magnetic resonance imaging workflows, creating new opportunities and responsibilities for medical physicists. This program is designed to prepare medical physicists to effectively evaluate,...

Re-irradiation is increasingly used for patients with local recurrence or new tumors adjacent to a previously irradiated site. However, high-level evidence on re-irradiation is scarce, particularly the safety and toxicity from cumulative dose. Moreover, there...

Common contour evaluation metrics(e.g., DSC or HD) provide global summaries that can miss localized, anisotropic disagreements that drive clinically meaningful edits. Although surface-DSC(SDSC) better reflects boundary discrepancies, it typically uses a subje...

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...

Clinical proton dose prescription uses a fixed relative biological effectiveness (RBE) factor of 1.1 despite preclinical and clinical evidence that RBE varies with dose, radiation quality and tissue radiosensitivity, particularly near the distal edge of treat...

In proton therapy, misalignment between planning and repeat CT arises from variations in patient positioning, physiological motion, and treatment-related anatomical changes, compromising contour propagation and treatment plan adaptation. Conventional deformab...

To develop, compare, and validate a nomogram that uses tumor shape and size to predict seed density for Diffusing Alpha-emitters Radiation Therapy (Alpha DaRT) treatment planning with flexible and needle applicators.

A novel high-resolution and bias-free deuterium MRI B1+ mapping method was developed for validating the simulation accuracy of a 7T body RF coil. The extremely low SNR of X-Nuclei causes significant problems for conventional B1+ mapping techniques, resulting...

Real-time dose verification remains a critical unmet need in radiation therapy. We developed physics-informed AI models for radiacoustic imaging (RAI) to enable quantitative, real-time in vivo dose monitoring for proton therapy. Our approach addresses two big...

Quality and safety concepts have remained important to Radiation Oncology. Historically, adherence to strict and prescriptive quality assurance paradigms was prioritized, but attention has recently shifted towards prospective risk mitigation—including holisti...

X-ray Minibeam Radiotherapy (MBRT) is an emerging technology recently translated to first-in-human treatments. MBRT uses narrow beamlets generated by specialized collimators to produce spatially fractionated dose distributions with high peak-to-valley dose ra...

To streamline the treatment planning and delivery workflow for VMAT‑based Total Body Irradiation (TBI) and evaluate its impact on utilization of clinical resources.

Minor and major errors may occur in both manual and automatic organ contouring process, such as mis-localization or severe under/over-segmentation. They can subsequently impact the accuracy of dose optimization and planning. This study aims to develop an auto...

MRI diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) fiber tracking is a valuable tool for visualizing white matter pathways but is typically time consuming and operator dependent. This work presents the development and validation of an automated imaging post-processing tool f...

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...

Deep-learning (DL) auto-segmentation is routinely used clinically, yet domain shift and vendor model upgrades can change behavior in non-intuitive ways. We present a regression-testing framework to commission upgraded commercial auto-contouring models and to...

To develop a super-resolution convolutional neural network to generate high-resolution temporal bone images beyond the resolution limitation of a commercial photon-counting-detector (PCD) CT.

Dose Volume Histogram (DVH) indices remain a backbone of treatment planning in radiation therapy. Many outcomes studies treat DVH indices as independent candidate predictors and retain only indices that meet the statistical significance cutoff of p=0.05. Such...

Dose-averaged linear energy transfer (LETd) is increasingly used to characterize biological risk in proton therapy. However, LET definitions differ among treatment planning systems. RayStation 2023B reports LET-to-water, whereas Monte Carlo engines such as MC...

Toxicities to organs remain a critical limitation to dose escalation in radiotherapy. Ion radiotherapy reduces the absorbed dose to normal tissue but is characterized by a higher relative biological effectiveness (RBE). Existing clinically relevant methodolog...

To evaluate consensus-based guardrails for improving the robustness of an in-house deep learning Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) respiratory phase prediction model used for respiratory-gated radiotherapy. Consensus filter configurations were compared based on t...

The Mayo Clinic Florida microdosimetric kinetic model (MCF MKM) provides highly accurate relative biological effectiveness (RBE) calculations for carbon ion radiation therapy (CIRT), but its clinical use is limited by extreme memory and computational demands...

Thyroid nodules, characterized by abnormal cell growth within the thyroid gland, pose a significant diagnostic challenge, particularly when distinguishing between benign and malignant nodules. Accurate differentiation is crucial to prevent unnecessary fine ne...

Accurate voxel-wise RBE modeling for carbon ion radiation therapy (CIRT), such as the Mayo Clinic Florida Microdosimetric Kinetic Model (MCF-MKM), is computationally prohibitive for time-constrained clinical workflows. Monte Carlo (MC) calculations can requir...

Accurate voxel-wise RBE modeling for carbon ion radiation therapy (CIRT), such as the Mayo Clinic Florida Microdosimetric Kinetic Model (MCF-MKM), is computationally prohibitive for time-constrained clinical workflows. Monte Carlo (MC) calculations can requir...

DeepTuning is a deep learning–based dose prediction framework that generates multiple dose distributions with different trade-offs, analogous to multi-criteria optimization. Leveraging historical cases with varying trade-offs, DeepTuning extracts semantic tra...

Pencil beam scanning (PBS) proton therapy provides highly conformal dose distributions that are increasingly leveraged for postmastectomy radiation therapy (PMRT) to reduce cardiopulmonary exposure. However, implant-based reconstruction in the setting of PMRT...

Multi-echo(ME)-fMRI improves BOLD sensitivity compared with single-echo acquisitions by increasing temporal signal-to-noise ratio (tSNR) and sampling multiple-echoes in one repetition time. ME-fMRI particularly benefits from the head-only compact 3T (C3T) sca...

To evaluate the agreement between Varian RapidPlanPT DVH estimates and clinically delivered plans using an independent validation set for head and neck cancer (HNC) treated with proton radiation therapy.

The MIRAGE trial demonstrated reduced acute toxicity in intact prostate radiotherapy in MRI arm, partially attributed to the use of smaller PTV margins (2 mm versus 4 mm with CT guidance). Motivated by these findings, this study retrospectively evaluates whet...

To quantitatively evaluate and compare imaging performance of various kV-CBCT systems implemented on modern C-arm and O-ring linear accelerator units.

Deep learning-based image reconstruction and noise reduction (DLR) techniques are increasingly adopted in clinical CT to improve image quality at reduced radiation doses. While prior studies have demonstrated benefits for lesion detection, DLR performance in...

Accurate delivery of MR-guided adaptive radiotherapy (MRgART) for prostate SBRT is influenced by inter- and intra-fraction motion, planning target volume (PTV) margin selection, and verification adaptation. Our study quantified motion magnitude and dosimetric...

This project aimed to characterize a shielding technique for total skin electron therapy (TSET) patients with implanted cardiac devices (ICDs). Goals of the work included quantifying shielding effectiveness by quantifying and minimizing the dose delivered to...

To evaluate the dosimetric performance of an in-house developed fully automated VMAT total body irradiation (TBI) treatment planning platform.

To evaluate the clinical efficacy and planning efficiency of RapidPlanPT for proton beam breast cancer treatment planning.

Accurate patient setup in deep inspiration breath hold (DIBH) proton therapy is critical due to steep dose gradients, limited range robustness, and the frequent use of tight clinical target volume (CTV) margins. This study introduces a CT-on-Rails (CTOR)–base...

To evaluate a new slot scanning technology (True2Scale (T2S), Multitom Rax, Siemens Healthcare, Germany) and compare it with conventional EOS biplane slot scanning (EOS Imaging, France) for scoliosis examinations via phantom and retrospective patient studies.

Photon-counting CT (PCCT) incorporates detector technology that supports quantitative imaging in routine diagnostic evaluation by reducing scanner- and patient-specific effects, thereby enabling more reliable material quantification and characterization. Prev...

Existing spatial domain implementations of Hotelling observers used to assess imaging system performance provide a single SNR figure of merit associated with a symmetric test object. The purpose of this work was to develop and validate a pixel-specific model...

Monte Carlo (MC) dose calculation is the gold standard for CyberKnife radiotherapy, but its clinical integration is hindered by prohibitive computational latency. We proposed a physics- and spatially-informed diffusion model with Vision Transformer (PSIDMV) t...

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...

To assess the impact of scanning speed on beam data quality using a novel plastic scintillation detector (PSD) compared with conventional methods, with the goal of enabling ultrafast scanning.

Photon-counting-detector (PCD) CT acquires multi-energy data in a single scan, enabling quantitation of electron density (ρe) and effective atomic number (Zeff). This study assessed the performance of PCD-CT for ρe and Zeff mapping across different phantom si...

To assess the impact of parameters on CT gout identification

Synchrotron-based proton spot scanning includes non-productive dead time from layer switching and spill change/reinjection. In dose-driven continuous scanning, spill changes are commonly triggered only after beam exhaustion, causing sequential overheads. We p...

To present preliminary validation results for the first carbon treatment planning system (TPS) in the United States and to benchmark its GPU Monte Carlo dose engine using depth-resolved dose and microdosimetric metrics.

To enhance spatial resolution in all three dimensions (x, y, z) of coronary CT angiography (cCTA) acquired with conventional energy-integrating detector (EID)-based CT systems, using a protocol-aware multi-slice deep learning model trained with resolution-mat...

Neural networks have recently been demonstrated that convert single-energy CT images into dual-energy CT images. It seems at first that this “dual-energy conversion” is only possible using image priors: one might assert that if a neural network is shown a pha...

Radiofrequency (RF) power deposition during MRI can cause patient warming, leading to discomfort and potential motion artifacts. Convective heat removal within the magnet bore is provided by the built-in ventilation fan; however, fan performance is not quanti...

This study is to quantify geometric distortion magnitude and evaluate vendor-provided distortion correction performance across four Siemens and GE MRI scanners operating at 1.5T, 3T, and 7T.

While Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) have set new benchmarks for synthetic CT (sCT) image quality, their prohibitive inference times hinder integration into online adaptive radiation therapy (ART) workflows. This study introduces HQ-PatchNet...

To identify planning techniques that consistently result in robust VMAT-TBI plans for patients wider than 48cm that allow for patient setup uncertainty 5mm or more.

Stopping-power ratio (SPR) is used in proton therapy to calculate the radiation dose distributions. SPR depends on tissue composition and can be calculated using multi-energy CT. This study compares the accuracy of SPR calculated using energy-integrating dete...

To establish a rapid quality-control (QC) methodology and baseline performance metrics for T1 and T2 relaxation time estimation across a multi-vendor fleet of 3T MRI systems.

To survey current clinical practice, assess priorities, and identify resource gaps related to environmental sustainability in medical imaging physics.

Accurate prediction of radiotherapy toxicity requires integrating heterogeneous data, including 3D dose distributions, patient anatomy, and unstructured clinical text. We developed a multimodal pipeline that couples deep learning–based dose prediction (3D Med...

Phase II and III clinical trials establish standards of care in radiation oncology; however, achieving equivalent clinical outcomes in routine practice depends on the reproducible implementation of trial protocols. We systematically evaluated whether publishe...

Therapy Physics

Therapy Physics

Clinical evidence generally suggests proton therapy can reduce treatment-related toxicity, especially in tumors near critical structures such as the brain, spinal cord, heart. This benefit is well established in pediatric cancers, where reducing radiation exp...

This study investigates the use of a haptic ultrasound simulator to support the development of core competencies—including image acquisition, interpretation, and equipment handling—among undergraduate students enrolled in a Clinical Measurement Health Science...

Lung tumors are poorly visible on conventional on-board 2D X-ray imaging due to limited soft-tissue contrast and overlapping anatomy, posing a challenge for patient setup on proton therapy systems equipped with 2D X-ray imaging. Our goal is to develop a novel...