Sastry Vedam, Ph.D.

2003, Virginia Commonwealth University

The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center
Department of Radiation Physics

Contact Information

Research Interests:

Recent advances in imaging, treatment planning and radiation delivery systems have facilitated the development of adaptive radiation therapy. This involves employing image guidance to (a) to determine a representative location of the tumor volume (b) to correct for changes in inter-fraction changes in the treatment portal and also (c) to obtain tumor trajectories within each fraction of radiation delivery. Availability of such information has further facilitated the development of treatment planning approaches that explicitly account for all such positional variations, thereby “adapting” the radiation treatment according to patient needs. The perceived necessity for such adaptation has driven research into approaches to adapt radiation delivery to all variations in tumor position, shape and size that could occur during the course of a radiation treatment. It is expected that such an approach will greatly assist in improving treatment outcomes; especially for thoracic and abdominal tumors that exhibit significant variations in position due to several physiological factors such as respiratory, cardiac and peristaltic motion.

The proposed areas of research therefore would be in developing some consistent expectations of a model of patient anatomy that will both spatially and temporally represent all motion variations encountered in the real world, understanding the applications of such models for radiotherapy treatment planning and developing effective methods to adapt radiation delivery on a fraction-by-fraction basis.

Depending on the student’s interests, a tutorial in my laboratory would provide experience with respiratory motion management in radiotherapy, respiratory motion modeling, 4D CT, 4D Cone beam CT imaging, Respiratory gated radiation delivery, motion phantom development through servo control systems.



Publications


Program Affiliation:

Program in Medical Physics