Xiaofeng Yang
Emory University, GA·Biomedical Engineering
Radiation therapy that delivers very high doses in a few sessions, called stereotactic body radiation therapy, only works if the beam hits a small target precisely, because the dose falls off sharply just outside it. Tumors in the lung move with every breath, so hitting them reliably is hard.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Medicine & Clinical Research
Computer Science
- Topics
stereotactic body radiation therapy
radiotherapy
lung cancer
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2028
What they work on
- Develop and refine a deep learning method that reconstructs real-time on-board volumetric images from very few two-dimensional projections for direct, markerless three-dimensional lung tumor tracking.
- Build image correction and automatic tumor and multi-organ segmentation methods for the reconstructed volumetric images so anatomy can be delineated during treatment.
- Compute the actually delivered dose from in-treatment anatomy using Monte Carlo simulation and high-performance computing, enabling dose-guided adaptive stereotactic body radiation therapy.
- Evaluate the accuracy and clinical benefit of the integrated real-time imaging, tracking and dose verification system using lung treatment as a testbed.
More about the research
Today's workarounds either irradiate a large margin covering the whole range of motion, which exposes healthy tissue, or deliver radiation only during a narrow window of the breathing cycle while tracking the tumor indirectly, through markers on the skin or implanted seeds. Neither shows where the tumor actually is at a given instant, and unexpected motion during treatment can make the delivered dose differ substantially from the plan.
Why it matters
Lung tumors move with breathing, so radiation either misses or spreads into healthy lung, raising toxicity. Direct, markerless three-dimensional tracking during treatment could shrink targeting uncertainty, catch unexpectedly large tumor motion for patient safety, and let clinicians verify the dose actually delivered and adjust later sessions accordingly. The grant notes the approach may be adapted to liver and pancreas treatments.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Michael King
University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, MA·Biomedical Engineering
Create Monte Carlo simulations of Ac-225 PSMA SPECT/CT imaging in targeted alpha therapy to jointly optimize collimator design and physics-based image reconstruction for tumor detection and quantification.
Benjamin Kozower
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Medicine & Clinical Research
Compare 3-year disease-free survival after surgery versus stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) in patients with clinical stage I non-small cell lung cancer, using propensity score–matched cohorts from a multi-center prospective study.
Krishna Nayak
University of Southern California, CA·Biomedical Engineering
Develop and technically validate volumetric real-time MRI data acquisition on a 0.55 Tesla scanner to image the moving heart and airway in 3D.
The school
Emory University: 70 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 286 research doctorates a year.
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