Low Dose Radiation Therapy for Osteoarthritis

Project in progress. Details to be added later… Low dose radiation therapy (LDRT) is an effective symptom management option for osteoarthritis (OA). However, the mechanistic picture of this treatment is unclear. Existing pre-clinical studies have established the anti-inflammatory effects of LDRT at the cellular level, but a deeper understanding at the molecular level is needed. With this project, we aim to identify the anti-inflammatory molecular pathways triggered by LDRT. This project is a physics-biology collaboration, leveraging physics expertise in microtomographic imaging (microCT) and small animal radiation research platform (SARRP), to investigate a novel model system.

Image-guidance Software Development

To augment the proton treatment console at Mayo Clinic Rochester with the capability of fluoroscopy-based motion verification and monitoring, I developed computer vision application (Code name: Wukong), based on high-speed acquisition and real-time processing of flat-panel detector (FPD) data streams. Built as a fully DICOM-aware utility, this .NET/C# Windows desktop application is integrated into treatment planning workflow with Varian Eclipse Scripting API. It also provides an optional ability to store live-captured fluoroscopic frames on a HIPAA-compliant scalable storage cloud.

Nanoconfined polymer electrolytes

We probe the nanoscale viscosity and molecular structure of confined polymer electrolytes (SPE) inside rigid nanovolumes, using X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy (XPCS) and grazing incidence X-ray scattering (GIWAXS), respectively.