Medical Physics Seminar – Monday, February 6, 2023
Small Animal IMRT for Preclinical Dose Painting
Jordan M. Slagowski, PhD, DABR
Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Recent advances in functional and molecular imaging technologies offer potential to personalize radiation therapy by probing pathophysiological tumor processes. However, there are a lack of preclinical methodologies available to determine how to best incorporate this information into clinical radiotherapy treatments. Tumor hypoxia is the perfect example of a source of radiation resistance and eventual treatment failure that has been known for over a century but has not translated into guiding clinical radiation treatments.
This seminar will review some of the technological shortcomings of preclinical irradiators that may be hindering the translation of preclinical results to clinical outcomes. In particular, radiation biologists have largely relied on non-targeted open-field bulk irradiations of whole animals or organs while human treatments are highly conformal due to inverse planning systems and beam intensity modulators. We will present the development of an inverse treatment planning system and method to rapidly fabricate miniature beam compensators to enable small animal IMRT. Results will be presented for several example applications including dose painting tumor hypoxia and evaluation of organ toxicities.