Dr Jason Dowling, a member of the CSIRO AEHRC Biomedical Imaging group has been awarded a two year $300k Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia Movember Young Investigator Grant to further develop work on high precision MRI-alone prostate radiation therapy . This work continues the strong collaboration with Associate Professor Peter Greer and the Department of Radiation Oncology at the Calvary Mater Newcastle Hospital.
External beam radiation therapy is a major and successful treatment for prostate cancer. However treatment side effects can include rectal bleeding, rectal urgency, incontinence, erection problems and inflammation of the bowel. MRI allows the borders of the prostate, rectum and bladder to be identified with greater precision than CT scans. The aim of this project is to reduce treatment side effects by using MRI scans for treatment planning. Building on our previous work, we will rapidly identify the boundaries of these organs from MRI scans with a very high level of accuracy and develop treatment plans based on the MR information alone. This is a first step towards next generation combined MRI-linear accelerator treatment machines.
Further details are available at: http://aehrc.com/research/biomedical-imaging/medical-image-analysis/prostate-radiotherapy
Last Updated on Tuesday, 10 April 2012 14:05
