Recent News, Updates & Recognitions
Jones Receives Prestigious Speaking Invitation
Congratulations to A. Kyle Jones, Ph.D., for being invited to deliver the S. Julian Gibbs Oration at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology (AAOMR) in San Antonio this September. Jones received this prestigious honor in recognition of his substantial contributions to the field of medical physics. The theme of his talk will be “Risks from exposure to low doses of ionizing radiation: Separating reality from hype.”
Jones regularly lectures at national and international conferences, has organized several conferences, served as faculty for hands-on workshops, and written several book chapters. He has mentored numerous clinical residents and fellows. He has worked as a collaborator on several grants funded by professional societies and industry, and is currently the PI of an industry-funded research grant and the lead investigator of the ACR-SIR Fluoroscopy Dose Index Registry.
Pan Elected to AAPM Fellowship
Congratulations to Tinsu Pan, Ph.D., for his election as Fellow of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM).
Fellow status is the highest grade of membership. It is reserved to honor AAPM members who have made significant, long-standing contributions to the field and exhibited leadership, and dedicated service. Pan's Fellowship status recognizes his distinguished contributions to medical physics by his peers. The award will be presented at the awards ceremony and reception at the annual meeting of the AAPM in July.
Educational Stipends Awarded to Attend ISMRM Meeting
Three Imaging Physics educational appointees are receiving a trainee stipend award from the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) to attend the ISMRM Annual meeting is Paris, France. The award includes a cash stipend plus a registration waiver for the conference and is funded by the ISMRM Research and Education Fund. Congratulations! At the meeting, the following first author abstracts will be presented:
Benjamin Musall, M.S. (Advisor: Jingfei Ma, Ph.D.)
Automated contouring and ADC measurement of esophageal cancer with a fully convolutional network
Benjamin Musall, Steven Lin, Brett Carter, Penny Fang, Amy Moreno, Jeremiah Sanders, Jong Bum Son, and Jingfei Ma
Musall’s project, Automated contouring and ADC measurement of esophageal cancer with a fully convolutional network, applies Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN’s) as an automated method to contour esophageal tumor volumes on DWI.
Jeremiah Sanders (Advisors: Jingfei Ma, Ph.D. and Steven Frank, M.D.)
SeedNet: a sliding window convolutional neural network for radioactive seed detection and localization in MRI
Jeremiah Sanders, Steven Frank, and Jingfei Ma
Parallel imaging compressed sensing for MRI only radiation dosimetry of post implant prostate cancer brachytherapy
Jeremiah Sanders, Steven Frank, Hao Song, Paula Berner, Aradhana Venkatesan, and Jingfei Ma
Sanders’ project, An MRI-only approach to imaging and post-implant assessment of prostate cancer brachytherapy, aims to exploit compressed sensing and artificial intelligence to enable MRI-based imaging and assessment of prostate cancer brachytherapy treatments without an endorectal coil.
Christopher Walker, Ph.D. (Advisor: Jim Bankson, Ph.D.)
Slice profile induced errors in metabolic quantification of hyperpolarized pyruvate
Christopher M Walker and James A Bankson
Walker’s project aims to leverage simulation and phantom studies to develop and optimize accurate and reliable quantification methods for MRI of hyperpolarized pyruvate.
Thrower Paper Receives SPIE Award
Congratulations to Medical Physics Ph.D. student, Sara Thrower, for being selected as one of two runner-up winners for the 2018 SPIE Physics of Medical Imaging Student Paper Award! Her paper, Sensitivity and specificity of a sparse reconstruction algorithm for superparamagnetic relaxometry, was reviewed by the three conference co-chairs. They were particularly impressed with the innovation of Thrower’s work.
As a runner-up, she will be receiving a monetary award and a certificate, which will be handed out on February 15 during the SPIE Medical Imaging 2018 conference, currently being held in Houston.
Thrower’s project, A Sparse Reconstruction Algorithm for Superparamagnetic Relaxometry, aims to improve the early detection of cancer by developing an algorithm to recover the location of cancer-bound nanoparticles from measurements of their unique magnetic properties. John Hazle, Ph.D. is Thrower's medical physics advisor.