This is the last Physics 10 Seminar for this term. The speaker, Dr. Lixin Zhan, obtained his PhD at Waterloo in 2005 in Theoretical Physics, and he has successfully switched into Medical Physics. He is now a Medical Physicist at Grand River Hospital, and you can learn about a career in Medical Physics by attending this seminar.
Lixin Zhan
Grand River Regional Cancer Centre
With the development of modern technologies, radiation therapy has become one of the main modalities in cancer management. When tissue is radiated with external beams or irradiative sources, a series of interactions occur between the incident particles and tissue materials, which include photoelectric effect, Compton effect, and pair production for photons, and collisional and Bremsstrahlung effect for electrons. These interactions directly or indirectly result in the energy deposition in tissue, hence the dose and its three dimensional distribution. The deposited energy causes damage to cells as a result of breaking the DNA double helix. If tumor cells are damaged, we are treating the cancer. However, healthy tissue cells may be damaged too. In this talk, we will give a brief introduction of the particle interactions within the therapeutic range, the basic concept of treatment planning, and the methods of maximizing tumor cell killing while minimizing normal tissue cell killing. We will also introduce the general procedure of cancer management with radiation therapy.
