The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
Department of Radiation Physics

My primary research interests focus on personalization of radiation medicine through the development and implementation of novel imaging biomarkers for outcome assessment in radiotherapy, toxicity modeling for radiation therapy in several different disease sites, and implementation of adaptive radiation therapy strategies in upper abdominal cancers. The ability to accurately model radiation toxicity can lead to improved outcomes in radiation therapy, but is complicated by heterogeneity among patient populations. I seek to develop new methodologies and imaging biomarkers that will improve normal tissue complication probability (NTCP) models and therefore allow for a deeper understanding personalized factors that can improve radiation treatment. Some examples of this are my previous works, where we developed novel CT- and PET-based imaging biomarkers to improve toxicity prediction of esophagitis in patients with non-small-cell lung cancer and identify subpopulations that may be inherently radiosensitive. Current extensions of this work are to include radiomics, dosiomics, and radiogenomics in the model development process. Additionally, we are investigating the use of hyperolparized Xe-129 MRI to mitigate radiation-induced lung injury. Another research focus of mine is the use of daily computed tomography (CT) imaging to develop online adaptive radiation therapy approaches for liver and pancreatic cancers, which could potentially allow for higher precision in targeting tumors. As a consequence radiotherapy margins could be reduced and treatment dose could be escalated.   

PubMed

Education & Training

PhD, MD Anderson UTHealth Houston Graduate School, 2016

Research Info

-Outcome modeling and machine learning for precision radiation medicine

-Quantitative imaging in radiation oncology

-Adaptive radiation therapy for liver and pancreatic cancers