Jason Vickress
Jason Vickress has completed a BASc in the Honours Nanotechnology Engineering program at the University of Waterloo. He is currently working on his PhD in Medical Biophysics at Western under supervision of Drs. Slav Yartsev and Rob Barnett. His research focuses on using daily pre-treatment CT images to evaluate the impact of anatomical changes on a radiation therapy treatment, and determine when plan adaptation is required. Radiation therapy is one of the major treatment options for cancer patients. Currently a radiation therapy treatment plan is created based on the patient’s anatomy at the time of their planning CT study. A typical radiation therapy treatment is delivered across 5 35 separate fractions introducing various anatomical changes from their original anatomy. Our lab has proposed using deformable image registration on the planning and daily CT images to obtain a metric describing anatomical change and combine this with the planned radiation dose distribution. The end result will describe how the dose to organs at risk and the tumour volume will change, when their original radiation treatment plan is delivered on the patient’s new anatomy. Our goal is to incorporate our method into a software tool for clinicians to evaluate how the radiation delivery has been altered by the change in anatomy for each day of treatment, and determine if a plan adaption is required.
