Michael King
University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, MA·Biomedical Engineering
Targeted alpha therapy (TAT) is a new kind of cancer treatment. Patients receive drugs that carry alpha-particle-emitting radioactive atoms straight to tumors that have spread through the body.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Medicine & Clinical Research
Physics
- Topics
single-photon emission computed tomography
targeted alpha therapy
Ac-225
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- 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.
- Determine optimal high-energy general-purpose (HEGP) collimator designs by optimizing them together with reconstruction, scoring quantification by region-of-interest signal-to-noise ratio and detection by LROC curves from a physician-matched numerical observer.
- Evaluate recovery-curve and template-based corrections for the partial volume effect, where image blur spills counts between neighboring voxels, and characterize the resulting bias, noise, and 3D spatial resolution.
More about the research
Doctors need to know how much radiation each tumor and healthy organ actually receives, and whether tumors are appearing or disappearing. They can then raise or lower the dose in later treatment cycles. Imaging these agents with SPECT (single-photon emission computed tomography, a 3D nuclear medicine scan) is hard. The doses given are very low, so images are noisy. The photons emitted span a complex range of energies. In addition, the decay products recoil and can break free of the drug and move to other sites.
Why it matters
Patients with advanced, widespread cancer treated with targeted alpha therapy could benefit from more accurate SPECT images. Better detection of new or vanishing tumors and better measurement of where the radioactive drug goes would improve radiation dose estimates. Clinicians could then personalize later treatment cycles, raising the dose to metastases while avoiding toxicity to normal organs.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Janet Conrad
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA·Physics
Develop beam diagnostics, instruments that measure the particle beam, for a full-scale central-region prototype of the high-current IsoDAR cyclotron.
Kuang Gong
University of Florida, FL·Biomedical Engineering
Develop a data-driven respiratory motion-correction framework with phase-matched attenuation correction to reduce breathing blur in Gallium-68 PET scans of tumors.
Xiaofeng Yang
Emory University, GA·Biomedical Engineering
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.
The school
University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School: 29 labs on PI Pages, $350M a year on research, 55 research doctorates a year.
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