Paige Cash and Albert Wright will be supervised by Sarah Bugby. Devesh Shah, Emily Murray, and Lois Wright will be supervised by Jenny Spiga.
Albert's project "Diverging collimators for gamma imaging" will seek to predict the performance of collimators, factoring in geometrical design and material properties, to a great accuracy than existing analytical equations. By predicting collimator performance, we can explore new collimator designs for our portable gamma systems.
Devesh will be investigating spatially fractionated radiation therapy, a therapeutic approach with the potential to overcome some limitations of conventional radiation therapy. This project will involve a study of the physical and radiobiological mechanisms involved, and it will provide a comparison of proton and X-ray approaches.
Lois' project "Characterisation of Inverse Compton Scattering Sources for Microbeam Radiation Therapy" will investigate different parameters of new compact sources to be used for radiotherapy applications to find the most appropriate configuration. Lois will collaborate with our research partner , a new source which has recently become available in Orsay, near Paris, France, with potential applications in medical physics and beyond.
Paige will be working on - an open source and GUI-controllable ray-tracing simulation for dual energy CT which was developed by a previous project student, Joshua Gray, with assistance from Sofia Pearson. Paige will be using DECTSim to investigate material decomposition techniques in DECT.
Emily will be using Monte Carlo simulations to investigate the influence of dose enhancers on X-ray radiotherapy. Using Monte Carlo simulations (a gold standard in medical physics), Emily will investigate the relationship between dose enhancer concentration and beam energy, size and spacing. Dose enhancers could play an important role in the use of Inverse Compton scattering sources for radiotherapy, making up for the lower the dose rate.