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Image-guided radiation therapy of cancer: Seeing what you are treating

Date

Monday February 11, 2019
2:30 pm - 3:30 pm

Location

Stirling A

Dr. Elsayed Ali
The Ottawa Hospital Cancer Centre

Abstract

About half of cancer patients receive radiation therapy as part of their overall cancer treatment. The radiation can be photons, electrons, protons, or carbon ions, among others. The radiation source can be external (e.g., from a clinical linear accelerator) or internal (e.g., from an implanted radioactive source). Sophisticated optimization algorithms are used to create digital treatment plans that maximize the radiation dose deposited in the cancer target while minimizing the radiation dose to the surrounding healthy tissues as much as reasonably achievable. The success of a radiation treatment strongly depends on accurately delivering the treatment as planned, with minimal geometric and dosimetric deviations. A large array of image guidance and patient positioning systems have been developed to enable accurate radiation treatment delivery. In this talk, I will give an overview of these systems and the role of the clinical medical physicist in the development and implementation of such systems, with examples from the research work done at The Ottawa Hospital Cancer Centre. In the last part of my talk, I will highlight the exciting new developments in image guidance, which are expected to cause a paradigm shift in how radiation therapy of cancer is delivered in the near future.

Who Cares About Nuclear Beta Decay; Reactor Decay Heat, Astrophysical r-Process, and the Reactor Neutrino Anomalies and their Connections to Beta Decay

Date

Friday February 8, 2019
1:30 pm - 2:30 pm

Location

Stirling A

Charlie Rasco
Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Abstract

Beta decay has been a staple of nuclear physics since the 1930's. And understanding the fundamentals of beta decay is still at the fore-front of nuclear physics. But in addition to understanding the fundamentals of beta decay, precise experimental knowledge of beta decay has become important in recent years. Accurate knowledge of the beta-decay properties of unstable nuclei are important to understand energy release after fission, including whether the energy is released as, beta rays (electrons), gamma rays, neutrons, or neutrinos and antineutrinos. In addition to the description of nuclear reactor physics, beta decay plays an important role in the production of heavy nuclei in the universe. One astrophysical process that is based on nuclear data and beta decay properties is the r process. The r process proceeds through extremely neutron rich nuclei where there is very little experimentally measured nuclear data. Recent measurements at the RIKEN facility in Japan and at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee are starting to reach out to these exotic nuclei. I will present the importance of beta-decay data on scientific various endeavors and the impact of the latest beta-decay measurements on these endeavors.

A superficial tale: How thin threads of semiconductors can offer a remarkable platform for sensing and future electronics

Date

Friday January 25, 2019
1:30 pm - 2:30 pm

Location

Stirling A

Harry Ruda
University of Toronto

Abstract

The race to making smaller and smaller things can arguably be attributed to a talk given by the famous physicist, Richard Feynman, in a lecture he gave at an American Physical Society meeting in 1959. He envisaged new materials synthesized by manipulation of individual atoms – something realized by Don Eiglers group at IBM in 1989. On the way down, and in the spirit of manipulating matter are nanometer scale structures such as quantum dots and nanowires – the latter typically have diameters of a few tens of nanometers and lengths of about microns. In this talk, I will focus on nanowires and their unique properties, and how these can be used to advantage to realise state of the art chemical sensors and offer a possible future quantum computing platform. The talk will discuss the critical role of surface and surface electronic states on electron transport, and how on the one hand species interacting with the surface can dictate transport and signal details of those interactions, while on the other hand, appropriate manipulation of the surface states can reveal near-lossless electron transmission through the nanowires.

L. John Schreiner

John Schreiner

John Schreiner

Professor Emeritus

Affiliated Adjunct Faculty

Physics, Engineering Physics & Astronomy

School of Medicine-Oncology

ljs2@queensu.ca

John Schreiner Webpage

Dept. of Oncology - Cancer Centre of Southeastern Ontario (CCSEO)

Research Areas

Radiation Oncology / Medical Physics:
adaptive radiation therapy, therapy dose delivery validation, process quality assurance, cobalt radiation therapy

Current Research

Advanced image guided radiation delivery and tomotherapy techniques with Cobalt-60 sources, Co‑60 megavoltage imaging and computed tomography (CT), quantitative CT imaging, three dimensional radiation dosimetry with gel dosimeters and magnetic resonance and optical CT imaging, conventional radiation dosimetry and computer simulations of physical quantities in radiotherapy and at diagnostic energies, clinical evaluation of dose delivery in radiation treatment.

 

Marcus Tamura

Marcus Tamura

Marcus Tamura

PhD Candidate

he/him/his

Graduate Students

Physics, Engineering Physics & Astronomy

Arts & Science

20madt@queensu.ca

STI 161A

Area of Study

Research Areas: neuromorphic systems, quantum neural networks, atomic scale devices, and nanofabrication

Supervisor: Prof. B. Shastri

About Marcus

I enjoy boardgames, videogames and roleplaying games.

Hugh Morison

Hugh Morison

Hugh Morison

PhD Candidate

Graduate Students

Physics, Engineering Physics & Astronomy

Arts & Science

hugh.morison@queensu.ca

613-533-6000 ext. 74801

STI 511F

Research Areas

Hugh is pursuing his graduate degree at Queen’s researching neuromorphic silicon photonic systems. He received the B.A.Sc from Queen's in Engineering Physics with an option in Computing. His undergraduate thesis was on the simulation of silicon photonic neural network architectures. His interests are in novel computing systems and artificial intelligence.

Supervisor: Prof. B. Shastri

 

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