Dr. Ehsan Salari — associate professor of industrial, systems, and manufacturing engineering — will present on “Organ Motion Management in MRI-guided Radiation Therapy using a Control-theoretic Approach” at 11 a.m. Friday, March 25 via Zoom.
Internal organ motion poses a major challenge in the radiation treatment of lung and abdominal cancers. If unaccounted for, organ motion during radiation delivery may lead to under-dosing of cancer cells or overdosing of normal tissue, potentially causing treatment failure or normal-tissue toxicity. A new generation of radiation therapy devices are equipped with an onboard magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner to provide a real-time view of the patient anatomy with a high temporal resolution during radiation delivery. The anatomy visualization offers the opportunity to devise motion mitigation strategies in which the radiation treatment plan actively adapts to anatomical variation in real time during irradiation. This research proposes a control-theoretic approach to organ motion management for intensity-modulated radiation therapy. The proposed approach uses the real-time MRI information to monitor the delivery of radiation dose and dynamically adjusts the treatment plan in response to dose discrepancies that may occur due to respiration-induced motion.