Radiation therapy might become more precise than ever thanks to a two-part project being undertaken by researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) and the University of Texas (UT) Southwestern.

One project, funded by a $100,000, two-year seed grant, will utilize UT Southwestern’s database to simulate how heavy ion cancer therapies affect the body. “We will be looking for the patient anatomical and pathological variabilities so that the computed virtual patients can closely resemble the real patients,” Mingwu Jin, assistant professor of physics at UTA, told HCB News.

"Heavy ion cancer therapies are an option for terminal cancer where conventional radiation is not effective, but delivery of therapy has to be more precise, as the radiation levels are much higher," Jin said.

As the first step to the project, the researchers will develop a computer algorithm that simulates the effects of heavy ion radiation on tissue, reported Dallas/Fort Worth Healthcare Daily. They will try to establish a correlation between heavy ion dosage and prompt gamma, a byproduct that is emitted when the ions interact with body tissue.

“This is such a big project and contains a lot of technically challenging components, which require collaborative efforts to overcome challenges and develop novel techniques, to eventually bring this important therapeutic form to the patients,” Jin said, according to Dallas/Fort Worth Daily.

This project will help facilitate UT Southwestern initiatives to build a heavy ion therapy facility and a National Particle Therapy Research Center, which would be the first of its kind in the U.S.

Compared to proton therapy, "Heavy ion therapy is as fast and as painless, but more precise and more biologically potent," Dr. Arnold Pompos, assistant professor of radiation oncology at the University of Texas Southwestern (UTSW) Medical Center, told HCB News in February 2015.

The National Center for Heavy Ion Radiation Therapy is projected to be complete in 2021, at a total building cost of $200 to $250 million, according to estimates from last year.

The other part of the collaboration — funded by a $153,543 National Institutes of Health grant — will find the researchers working to improve the quality of image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT) techniques, specifically X-ray cone-beam CT.

X-ray photons pass through the body, there is a scatter effect that reduces the quality of the images that are produced because the photons don’t move in a straight line. According to Jin, this project should reduce the need for a physician to manually correct the scatter and also help ensure that any errors in dosage are within two percent of the acceptable dosage levels.

“Jin’s work will employ big data analysis and physics models to improve technologies used to deliver cancer therapy and ultimately improve patient care,” said Alex Weiss, chair of the UTA department of physics, in a statement.

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