Christmas Lectures on Medical Physics

Il giorno 6 dicembre presso l'aula 412 a partire dalle 15,15 introdotte da Angelo Taibi (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare), Paolo Cardarelli (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare) si terranno le Christmas Lectures on Medical Physics

• 15:30 -> 16:30 Speaker: Dr Antonio Sarno (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare)
  
• Investigations of innovative scanning geometries in cone-beam computed tomography

  Can cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) be used for computation of radiotherapy treatment plans? Can it be used for radiomic feature extractions? And for bone density assessment?
  At the state-of-the-art, CBCT high effectiveness/cost ratio, versatility and small dimensions determine its advantages with respect to other technologies and make of it of fundamental in routine medical imaging with its use spanning between dentomaxillofacial radiology, radiotherapy treatments, musculoskeletal system imaging, angiography and interventional radiology and advanced 3D breast imaging techniques. However, CBCT presents two intrinsic limitations which negatively affect image quality: 1) the large amount of the scatter radiation reaching the detector and 2) the cone-shaped x-ray beam rotating in a circular trajectory. The first causes both low-frequency noise and low-frequency artifacts and the second is source of 3D image degradation for portion of the field-of-view far from the plane containing the source trajectory. As main consequence of these images’ shortcoming, the use of CBCT is compromises in all those applications aiming at quantitative analysis in the reconstructed 3D images. Hence, CBCT is a no-standing alone imaging technology in several applications, such as radiotherapy treatment workflow, in the evaluation of the mineral bone density, in breast cancer diagnosis, in the repeatability and reproducibility of radiomic features, in the detection of small skeletal lesions, in pre- and post- surgical implant valuations and in automatic image segmentation.
  In this talk I will discuss the Q-CT research project, which proposes to move forward the use of such a technology, opening its use to a wide brand-new applications such as: quantitative imaging or automatic computation in radiotherapy treatment planning, characterization of small skeletal lesions, image guided radiotherapy, improved visibility of microcalcifications in breast CT, low-dose 3D breast and maxillofacial imaging, bone mineral density assessments, intraoperative and postoperative assessments, spectral CBCT, automation of image segmentation and extraction of radiomic features.
  This seminar aims at showing criticisms of the actual technology and to present the new proposed solution along with evidence of its potential toward the reduction of limitations of the conventional CBCT scanners.

  
  
• 16:15 → 16:30 Coffee - Room 400C
• 16:30-> 17:15 Speaker: Alberto Del Guerra (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare)
  The Birth, the Growth and the Future of Physics in Medical Imaging

  The birth of Medical Physics could be dated to more than 2500 years ago to Hippocrates (460-377 BC), a physician from Kos, better known as the “Father of Medicine”. However, it took until 1778 when in Paris the “Société royale de medicine” introduced the term “Physique Medicale” (Medical Physics) that has been used after since. On November 8, 1895, Wilhelm Rontgen discovered the X-rays, and everything changed: Radiology, Radiotherapy and Radioprotection were born. The discovery of the radioisotopes by Marie and Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel, the theory of the tracer by the chemist Gyorgy Hevesy and the invention of the cyclotron by Ernst Orlando Lawrence in 1929 for producing gamma-emitter radioisotopes such as 99mTc, and positron emitters such as 11C and 18F paved the way to the new specialty of Nuclear Medicine and to the two novel Medical Imaging techniques, i.e, Single Photon Emission Tomography (SPECT) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET). Then, by the end of the 20th century, the Physics in Medical imaging had completed its roster: the Computed Tomography (CT) was joined by the Optical Imaging techniques (Bioluminescence and Fluorescence), UltraSound, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), functionalMRI (fMRI), and very recently, Photoacoustic.
  In this talk I will shortly illustrate the state of the art of these techniques in the clinics with a special emphasis to PET and to the most recent applications of Hybrid Imaging (PET-MR; PET in Particle Therapy and MR driven Radiotherapy). Finally, I will make some speculations on the future developments of Physics in Medical Imaging with the advent of the personalized medicine.