Image Guided Therapy
(Mark Phillips, Paul Cho, Juergen Meyer)
Advances in imaging physiological processes, e.g. hypoxia, are an important development in targetting tissues for radiation therapy as well as assessing response to treatment. A collaboration with the Nuclear Medicine/PET group at UWMC is working to develop and apply deformable image registration for two separate clinical studies. The first is to use PET-FDG to reduce the size of target volumes in head and neck cancer, and thus reduce morbidity. The other is to use PET-FMISO to image hypoxia in head and neck tumors and to use the information to design IMRT treatments and to assess the response of the hypoxic regions to radiation therapy. This work is being performed in conjunction with the Nuclear Medicine Department (Paul Kinahan, Joseph Rajendran) and VA-Puget Sound (Eric Ford, David Schwartz).