Are you interested in a PhD in Medical Physics, in Geometric Modeling and Image Analysis? Do you want to develop novel personalized adaptive radiatiotherapy strategies that can help improving patient treatment? Do you want to be part of a dynamic research group that works in a multi-disciplinary environment at a world leading university medical center?
At Erasmus MC Cancer Institute, we have developed a tailored made technique for cervical cancer patients to adapt the Radiotherapy treatment to a specific patient geometry at the day of treatment. Such strategy is part of what is known as adaptive Radiotherapy, and the technique we developed is a plan-of-the-day approach, where multiple treatment plans are created from a patient specific motion model. Since 2011, we have been using this plan-of-the-day strategy on more than 200 treated patients and their quality of life has been monitored. The proposed PhD project is intended to analyze the clinical outcome of the plan-of-the-day workflow and to further extend it, where automation and personnalization will play a pivotal role.
Your tasks as a PhD student will involve:
- analyzing the quality of life results with respect to the received dose;
- creating an automatic plan selection workflow based on geometric patient models;
- developing a decision support system to trigger individualized plan adaptation.
You will present your results during national and international conferences, and publish them in international journals. The research should lead to clinical implementation of the procedures in daily routine, and you will play an active role in this implementation.