University of California, San Francisco

Accurate dose accumulation in cervical cancer radiotherapy combining external-beam radiotherapy (EBRT) and High-Dose-Rate brachytherapy (HDR) requires reliable Deformable-Image-Registration (DIR) between two drastically different planning CTs. Besides large a...

As treatment planning evolves toward patient-specific optimization, traditional static dose constraints are insufficient for distinguishing high-quality versus acceptable plans. Current planning directives rely on generic dose constraints that fail to strive...

Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology 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.

Radiopharmaceuticals, Theranostics, and Nuclear Medicine

Global advances in medical physics depend on interconnected research networks that facilitate mentoring, funding, collaboration, and long-term sustainability. Advancing cancer care worldwide requires a systematic, measurable, and globally interconnected resea...

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...

For medical physics residents, clinical decision-making can be a difficult skill to teach and master – most residents come from academic graduate programs with limited clinical exposure, and the regulatory nature of radiation oncology leads to limited opportu...

To reduce reliance on labor-intensive voxel-wise tumor masks by training CT segmentation models directly from routine radiology and pathology reports, enabling scalable detection and localization of tumors relevant to radiotherapy planning and incidental find...

This educational session will address why dosimetry is central to modern radiopharmaceutical therapy. It will highlight how fixed-activity approaches emerged historically and why they are increasingly insufficient in the context of therapeutic precision, safe...

To provide a large, diverse, and quality-controlled abdominal CT dataset with pancreas- and tumor-centric voxel-wise annotations to support benchmarking and development of AI models for pancreatic target segmentation and anatomy-aware evaluation relevant to r...

This study presents a hybrid framework combining Vision Transformer (ViT) and handcrafted radiomic features for oropharyngeal carcinoma (OPC), to enhance multi-endpoint survival prediction.

Effective radiotherapy for upper abdominal tumors requires dose escalation but is limited by respiratory motion and the low gastrointestinal radiation tolerance. Current clinical motion management on conventional Linacs relies on simple external surrogates th...

Cognitive decline following brain radiotherapy is strongly associated with hippocampal injury, yet scalable methods for assessing treatment-related hippocampal structural change in clinical practice remain limited. This study evaluates hippocampal volume loss...

Stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) reirradiation for locally recurrent brain metastases (BM) utilizes rigid image registration (RIR) for cumulative dose estimation to balance dose escalation against the risk of adverse radiation effects such as radionecrosis. Th...

In multi-target Gamma Knife (GK) radiosurgery, the clinical default plan typically sequences shots based on geometric efficiency to minimize treatment duration. However, this approach ignores the time-dependent biological effects of sublethal damage repair. T...

To evaluate dosimetric trends and robustness of online adaptive radiation therapy for focal-boosted prostate SBRT. Materials/

In an MRI-only simulation workflow, synthetic CT (sCT) are created from MR images and mimic the CT in terms of HU quality and geometric accuracy, therefore enabling dose calculation and patient setup verification. The elimination of CT acquisition leads to le...

To address the data scarcity bottleneck in deep learning (DL) dose prediction by establishing a foundation model-based transfer learning framework. We aim to demonstrate that adapting large-scale public priors to institutional data significantly enhances lear...

Accurate delineation of Head and Neck (H&N) Gross Tumor Volumes (GTV) is a prerequisite for effective radiotherapy, represents a significant cognitive challenge, and may contribute to an observed outcomes deficit between high-volume and low-volume H&N radioth...

To evaluate real-time, longitudinal performance of a commercial auto-segmentation model across a broad radiotherapy cohort and examine contour editing influence on planning decisions and organ-at-risk (OAR) doses, with attention to practice patterns, disease-...

Kinase-substrate interactions are inherently directional: kinases phosphorylate substrates, not vice versa, yet most network-based methods ignore this asymmetry, potentially discarding predictive signal.1 We investigated whether respecting biological directio...

The Varian Halcyon linear accelerator, featuring a ring-gantry design and dual-layer multileaf collimator (MLC), has gained increasing clinical adoption due to its streamlined workflow and operational efficiency. Unlike conventional C-arm linacs, Halcyon comm...

Proton therapy offers superior therapeutic ratio due to its favorable dose distribution, but accurate dose calculation remains challenging. Current methods rely on either pencil-beam algorithms (fast but inaccurate in heterogeneous media) or Monte Carlo simul...

Open-source radiotherapy quality assurance (OSQA) tools are increasingly available and offer potential value in resource-constrained settings. However, clinical adoption remains limited by gaps in validation, standardization, and implementation guidance, rath...

To determine whether tumor descriptions in routine radiology reports can be converted into controllable priors for synthetic tumor generation in CT, and whether these report-conditioned synthetic tumors improve robustness of tumor detection and segmentation r...

Decoder large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude show excellent text understanding in general domains but remain under-aligned to oncology-specific clinical context. This study aims to design and validate an alignment pipeline for decoder-based LL...

Respiratory motion management remains a challenge for radiotherapy in abdominal regions. This study aims to develop and validate a robust framework that correlates external body surface motion with internal liver tumor movement, enabling dose-free, real-time...

MRI provides advantages for tumor and critical structure delineation in head-and-neck (H&N) radiotherapy. However, H&N MR-only workflows remain challenging due to the large field-of-view and susceptibility artifacts arising from the sinuses, dental hardware,...

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...

To develop and evaluate a treatment planning and optimization framework for internal boron neutron capture therapy (internal BNCT) using a miniaturized neutron tube for the treatment of glioblastoma, and to quantify its dosimetric performance relative to phot...

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...

Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology Physics

Radiopharmaceutical therapy (RPT) is re-shaping how radiation is used to combat cancer since it provides a way to deliver radiation systemically. Due to its impactful clinical applications, RPT has been approved by the FDA to treat patients with metastatic ca...

As adaptive radiotherapy (ART) evolves from early innovation to standard clinical practice, structured training and credentialing frameworks are essential to ensure safety, consistency, and confidence across institutions. While technical readiness of ART plat...

The increasing variety and rapid evolution of MR-conditional, active implanted medical devices (AIMDs) in the last decade has expanded the medical physicists’ scope of practice to include the provision of expert safety consultation on the presence of these de...

Radiopharmaceuticals, Theranostics, and Nuclear Medicine

Clinical Trials Specialty Program

Professional

Therapy Physics

Therapy Physics

Therapy Physics

Accurate source localization and anatomical verification are critical for high dose rate (HDR) brachytherapy dose monitoring due to steep dose gradients. Our previous work only triangulated markers for source localization without fully utilizing the projectio...

Cone-Beam CT (CBCT) is central to image-guided radiotherapy (IGRT), but conventional CBCT is limited in their ability to capture respiratory-induced tumor motion, resolve soft-tissue contrast, and account for anatomical changes during treatment. These limitat...

At the subcellular scale, Monte Carlo track-structure (MCTS) has demonstrated good accuracy for modeling the initial radiation-induced biological damage by providing a detailed characterization of the spatiotemporal complex structure of ionizing radiation. At...

Radiopharmaceuticals, Theranostics, and Nuclear Medicine

The rapid advancement of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offers transformative potential for automated radiology; however, their ability to interpret 3D brain tumor imaging remains underexplored. This study introduces a rigorous benchmark to evaluate the diagno...

Pre-treatment heterogeneity in vascular architecture may contribute to differential susceptibility to radiation necrosis (RN), a dose-limiting toxicity of stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS). Using routine pre-treatment MRI, we introduce a novel graph-based analy...

PEG dependence is widely considered a consequence of head and neck re-irradiation (HN re-RT), yet PEG persistence around treatment is frequently misinterpreted as durable swallowing toxicity. We introduce a time-anchored definition of persistent PEG dependenc...

Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology Physics

MRI is increasingly integral across both diagnostic imaging and radiation therapy, yet quality assurance (QA) practices remain fragmented and often limited to phantom-based methods. While phantoms provide essential system checks, they cannot fully capture pat...

Therapy Physics

Craniospinal irradiation (CSI) is resource-intensive, requiring complex field junctions and long treatment times that challenge existing clinical workflow. Volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT) improves planning target volume (PTV) coverage and organ-at-ris...

Translation of tissue and tumor dose-response thresholds from external-beam radiation therapy (EBRT) to radiopharmaceutical therapies (RPTs) for dose optimization requires accurate values of relative biological effectiveness (RBE), which are still not known p...

To develop and validate an AI system that supports radiotherapy-relevant pancreatic target delineation by localizing and segmenting small pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) and related anatomy on routine contrast-enhanced CT, and to benchmark performance...

Professional

Current Gamma Knife (GK) planning typically decouples isocenter placement (heuristic-based) from sector duration optimization (SDO). This separation often leads to suboptimal plan quality and prolonged beam-on time (BOT). We propose an Integrated Isocenter an...