Whew...its been a while...so I'm currently in Bloomington Indiana doing medical physics research at the Midwest Pro
ton Radiotherapy Institute Cancer Clinic....and I love it.
It's kind of hard to get things done in the clinic because we have to work around patient treatments and everyone is so busy anyways. They dont mind helping, but rarely have time.
It seems like most of the other students in the REU were assigned to projects that were already started; all they had to do was jump in and help out. But mine wasn't even designed. Just my luck. So I've been doing a lot of reading and planning while others have been testing and calculating.
So most of you are like, "what the flip are you doing out there in Indiana?" Well, basically I'm working at a cancer clinic. It's called the Midwest Proton Radiotherapy Institute, is housed at Indiana University Cyclotron Facility, and is one of 5 proton therapy centers in the country.
Proton therapy is pretty kickass. Regular radiation therapy irradiates all of the tissue on the way to the tumor, especially the skin, and then irradiates the healthy tissue beyond the tumor, causing a lot of damage, especially in children or near organs, bones, ect. But proton therapy doesnt do that. When a proton enters your body, it emits a small amount of energy for a while (a plateau)and then emits all of its energy at once in a spike called a Bragg Peak. So the beam can be positioned so that that peak occurs exactly at the site of the tumor, thus avoiding any irradiation of healthy tissue.
This is a big deal. It means super powerful, precise cancer treatment without side effects normally associated with radiation. And its great for kids.
So MY deal is all of this is: they currently use a stationary beam for the most part. It stays still and they move the patient, blast them, move them, blast them, ect.
And they have a way to measure the dosage that beam gives. But they developed a new scanning beam that moves robotically during the treatment, so the person stays still and the beam moves around and does scans, meaning more thorough, precise treatment. But they dont have a way to measure the dosage and do calibrations.
My project is to build an array of the detectors they use for the stationary beam, use the same protocol (equations and guidelines) do a scan on the array, and see what kind of readouts we get. Basically its just a feasibility study: Can this work? Can this be used for dosimetry?
So, my research is coming along, but slowly. Here's whats up. Standard Imaging sent us almost $100,000 worth of equipment (8 ion chambers and an electrometer) to play with: Good. They sent us all of this equipment completely uncalibrated: Bad. They still haven't sent us our 8-chamber mount because they dont know how to make it fit our motor, even though they know exactly what motor it is: Lame.
What I've been up to lately is first of all, programming the robot motor control to put my water tank at the exact position. That wasn't so bad. But then I had to test each of the 8 chambers individually in order to determine the calibration factors that generally are determined by the manufacturer. But they weren't and they're needed in order to perform the absorbed-dose calculations.
So I did all that which took FOR-EV-ER. From there I designed a program that does all of those nasty dose calculations automatically. Here's how it works (if you are easily confused, jump ahead to the star haha): We put the chambers in the water and shoot them with the proton beam with a certain dose, say 100 units. The air in the chambers becomes ionized, i.e. collects a charge. The electrometer reads this charge. I then enter the collected charges into my data input table. I have rigged up my table to send that info to a calculation sheet where those nasty calibration factors I found, among other conditional factors, are used to convert that charge into a dose amount. Then we can see how much of that 100 units of dose was actually absorbed.
The program took forever to do because there are lots of calculations and they must be done for all 8 chambers. For all you computer programmers out there, I now know how truly derranged you all are. It's terrible. Now I have to figure out if I can get the electrometer to automatically dump the data into my program on its own so I dont have to manually enter it. That would be suh-weet.
Then when we get some intial readings I have to figure out what to do with the data to make it mean something. My work is pretty much cut out.
And when I'm not doing that, I'm blogging about doing that.
*Cancer sucks.
So, once again, check out www.mpri.org if ya wanna. That's where I am! Loves ya'll.
ton Radiotherapy Institute Cancer Clinic....and I love it.
It's kind of hard to get things done in the clinic because we have to work around patient treatments and everyone is so busy anyways. They dont mind helping, but rarely have time.
It seems like most of the other students in the REU were assigned to projects that were already started; all they had to do was jump in and help out. But mine wasn't even designed. Just my luck. So I've been doing a lot of reading and planning while others have been testing and calculating.
So most of you are like, "what the flip are you doing out there in Indiana?" Well, basically I'm working at a cancer clinic. It's called the Midwest Proton Radiotherapy Institute, is housed at Indiana University Cyclotron Facility, and is one of 5 proton therapy centers in the country.
Proton therapy is pretty kickass. Regular radiation therapy irradiates all of the tissue on the way to the tumor, especially the skin, and then irradiates the healthy tissue beyond the tumor, causing a lot of damage, especially in children or near organs, bones, ect. But proton therapy doesnt do that. When a proton enters your body, it emits a small amount of energy for a while (a plateau)and then emits all of its energy at once in a spike called a Bragg Peak. So the beam can be positioned so that that peak occurs exactly at the site of the tumor, thus avoiding any irradiation of healthy tissue.
This is a big deal. It means super powerful, precise cancer treatment without side effects normally associated with radiation. And its great for kids.
So MY deal is all of this is: they currently use a stationary beam for the most part. It stays still and they move the patient, blast them, move them, blast them, ect.
And they have a way to measure the dosage that beam gives. But they developed a new scanning beam that moves robotically during the treatment, so the person stays still and the beam moves around and does scans, meaning more thorough, precise treatment. But they dont have a way to measure the dosage and do calibrations.
My project is to build an array of the detectors they use for the stationary beam, use the same protocol (equations and guidelines) do a scan on the array, and see what kind of readouts we get. Basically its just a feasibility study: Can this work? Can this be used for dosimetry?
So, my research is coming along, but slowly. Here's whats up. Standard Imaging sent us almost $100,000 worth of equipment (8 ion chambers and an electrometer) to play with: Good. They sent us all of this equipment completely uncalibrated: Bad. They still haven't sent us our 8-chamber mount because they dont know how to make it fit our motor, even though they know exactly what motor it is: Lame.
What I've been up to lately is first of all, programming the robot motor control to put my water tank at the exact position. That wasn't so bad. But then I had to test each of the 8 chambers individually in order to determine the calibration factors that generally are determined by the manufacturer. But they weren't and they're needed in order to perform the absorbed-dose calculations.
So I did all that which took FOR-EV-ER. From there I designed a program that does all of those nasty dose calculations automatically. Here's how it works (if you are easily confused, jump ahead to the star haha): We put the chambers in the water and shoot them with the proton beam with a certain dose, say 100 units. The air in the chambers becomes ionized, i.e. collects a charge. The electrometer reads this charge. I then enter the collected charges into my data input table. I have rigged up my table to send that info to a calculation sheet where those nasty calibration factors I found, among other conditional factors, are used to convert that charge into a dose amount. Then we can see how much of that 100 units of dose was actually absorbed.
The program took forever to do because there are lots of calculations and they must be done for all 8 chambers. For all you computer programmers out there, I now know how truly derranged you all are. It's terrible. Now I have to figure out if I can get the electrometer to automatically dump the data into my program on its own so I dont have to manually enter it. That would be suh-weet.
Then when we get some intial readings I have to figure out what to do with the data to make it mean something. My work is pretty much cut out.
And when I'm not doing that, I'm blogging about doing that.
*Cancer sucks.
So, once again, check out www.mpri.org if ya wanna. That's where I am! Loves ya'll.
kevinmccallister:
Girrrrl, you sexy!