Monthly lunchtime seminar presented by Dr Jamie McClelland

Join us for this month's Medical Physics lunchtime seminar, presented by Dr Jamie McClelland. The topic will be: 'Computational tools for improving radiotherapy treatment of lung cancer'.

Abstract

40% of cancer patients will have some form of radiotherapy as part of their treatment. Radiotherapy is the use of ionizing radiation to treat cancer. The radiation damages the DNA of cells causing the cells to die. Whilst radiotherapy can be very effective at killing cancer cells, it can also affect normal cells, causing damage to nearby healthy tissue and leading to unwanted and sometimes very unpleasant side effects. Therefore, it is important to accurately direct the radiation at the tumour, and this can be particularly challenging for tumours that move while the patient is breathing, such as lung tumours.

This seminar will present two areas of research that I am working on that aim to improve radiotherapy for lung tumours, and hopefully lead to more effective and safer treatments. The first of these is computational models of respiratory motion. These models can be used to correct medical images that have been corrupted by respiratory motion, and to guide the delivery of radiotherapy treatment. The second area is studying the damage to the healthy lung tissue caused by radiotherapy, and looking for relationships with the radiation dose that was received by the healthy lung tissue. To facilitate this, we have been developing image processing pipelines for quantifying different types of lung damage and for more accurately estimating the dose that is actually delivered to different parts of the anatomy.

Dr McClelland's Bio

I studied for a MSCi in Computer Science with Electronic Engineering at UCL from 1999-2003. In 2004, I started my PhD under the supervision of Prof. Dave Hawkes, who was then based at KCL, on estimating the respiratory motion of lung tumours and surrounding anatomy from measurements of the 3D skin surface. 9 months in to my PhD, at the start of 2005, I moved to UCL together with Dave and most of our group to form the Centre for Medical Image Computing (CMIC). I completed my PhD in 2008 and became a post-doc in CMIC, and worked on a variety of different topics including ‘cylindrical registrations’ for CT colonography, image analysis for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), image processing for planning and guiding adaptive radiotherapy, and respiratory motion models. In 2015, I became a lecturer in Image Guided Radiotherapy at UCL, and am now leading a small but growing team of researchers working in this area. With their help, I hope that the next few years will see some of my long-term research interests start to fulfil their full potential, i.e. respiratory motion models, as well as exploring new and exciting avenues of research, e.g. the relationship between radiation induced lung damage and radiation dose.