Seminar

Medical Physics Seminar – Monday, September 14, 2015

A Review of Radiation Dosimetry Research Involving Computational Human Phantoms and Coprocessor-based Monte Carlo Dose Calculations

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speaker

Dr. Xie George Xu, (hosted by Dr. Larry DeWerd)
Edward E. Hood Endowed Chair of Engineering, Professor Nuclear Engineering Program, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Troy, New York - USA

For more than half a century, the modeling of the human anatomy for the purposes of Monte Carlo dose calculations has been an exciting research topic in radiation protection, imaging, and radiation therapy. A recent review article found that computational phantoms — which can be classified into three generations (stylized, voxelized and BREP phantoms) — have followed a surprising pattern of exponential growth in the past 60 years [1]. This seminar provides an in-depth discussion about the history of computational phantoms and technical challenges at different times. Basic geometry modeling techniques are introduced through selected phantoms and their applications in radiation dosimetry including the VirtualDose software tool for CT dose reporting that was developed from a family of age- and size-specific phantoms. The presentation also introduces the latest effort to drastically improve the speed of Monte Carlo dose calculations using hardware devices such as GPUs and MIC that merged recently for high-performance computing. Examples of clinical radiation dose application of these heterogeneous Monte Carlo computing methods are given using the ARCHER Monte Carlo code that is designed to work concurrently with CPU, GPI and MIC platforms.

BIOSKETCH
Dr. X. George Xu received a Ph. D. in Nuclear Engineering from Texas A&M University in 1994. He then joined Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in January of 1995 as Assistant Professor, and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2001 and then Professor in 2006. In 2007, he was appointed the Coordinator of the Nuclear Engineering Program and, then from 2011 to 2013, the Head of Nuclear Engineering Program at RPI. Dr. Xu has graduated 17 Ph.D. and 11 M.S. students. In his research, Dr. Xu is interested in novel computational and experimental methods that have important and diverse applications in radiation protection, radiation measurement, shielding design, reactor modeling, medical imaging, and radiotherapy. In particular, he uses Monte Carlo simulations as a research tool and has extensive experience in using and in developing Monte Carlo codes. Since 1995, Dr. Xu has directed numerous projects, with a total funding of about $15M (annual expenditures ~ $1M in recent years) from agencies such as NSF, DOE, NIH, NIST and EPRI. Dr. Xu has authored more than 150 peer-reviewed full papers and chapters, 300 conference abstracts, 100 invited seminars and presentations, 5 patents/disclosures and 6 software packages. Dr. Xu is a fellow of ANS, AAPM, and HPS. Dr. Xu has served as a co-founder of the International Consortium of Computational Human Phantoms and a co-editor for “Handbook of Anatomical Models for Radiation Dosimetry.” Dr. Xu received numerous awards including the NSF Faculty CAREER Award, the Professional Excellence Award by the American Nuclear Society’s Radiation Protection and Shielding Division, and the Randal S. Caswell Award for Distinguished Achievements by Council on Ionizing Radiation Measurements and Standards (CIRMS). In 2015. He organized the Hefei International Forum on Radiological Medical Physics: The Future of Proton and Heavy-ion Therapy in China.

Location: 1345 HSLC (Health Sciences Learning Center), 750 Highland Ave., Madison, WI 53705

Time: 4:00-5:00pm