One of the most dynamic areas of research in radio/hadron therapy and radiological imaging is to estimate and to determine the amount and the distribution pattern of energy deposited in various human’s organs. Even if in-vivo monitoring of the ion beam range in the patient through in-beam PET (ibPET) or other novel imaging modalities are actually searched, in the presence of motion of target and/or organs at risk, the quality of the registration between time resolved in-vivo dosimetry and patient anatomy (e.g., 4DCT) becomes a nontrivial issue. Enhanced non-invasive 4D motion-monitoring techniques are of high importance.
Moreover, compensated ion-beam irradiation techniques necessitate the estimation of the dose deposit within an organ of interest depending on physical and anatomical features of the traversed organs such as volume, mass, and shape, coupled with information on tissues densities and their chemical compositions.
The thesis focuses on the development of a new 4D multi-physics patient specific computational model (a 4D virtual phantom) representing simultaneously the motion, densities, chemical composition and dose deposit as well as a pre-clinical validation.
This 4D computational patient specific phantom could be potentially used for diagnosis, beam therapy, dose distribution computation or the registration between online imaging systems such as Gamma Prompt or PET activities with patient’s organs.