Tiberiu Burlacu

It is well known that proton therapy offers innate advantages over photon therapy due to the increased conformality in tumor coverage and lower dose in healthy tissue that are achievable with it. At the same time, it is also clear that anatomical changes, patient positioning errors and proton range errors coupled with stationary treatment plans lead to a degradation of the dose distribution and consequently an increase in side-effects. A solution to these problems comes in the form of online adaptive proton therapy. However, monitoring the patient anatomy on a daily basis, adapting and refining the treatment plan before each fraction and performing the necessary clinical quality assurance are currently labor intensive manual processes, heavily hindering the clinical adoption of adaptive workflows. In fact, some of the methods currently employed - such as dosimetric phantom-based-measurements - are infeasible in a daily adaptive setting.To overcome these challenges, Tiberiu's project aims at developing the automated methods for the quality assurance and robustness analysis that are necessary for a daily online adaptive proton therapy workflow.