Physical Society Colloquium

Medical Physics:
from physics to personalized radiation medicine

Jan Seuntjens

Medical Physics Unit
McGill University

The conventional role of medical physicists in cancer radiotherapy is to provide clinical service to ensure that radiation therapy can be accurately and safely delivered. Medical physics research, over the years, has been involved in the development of procedures, algorithms and devices to facilitate that goal. In recent times, cancer and its treatment, as a complex process, is increasingly being addressed and researched by quantitative physical scientists in collaboration with basic molecular researchers and clinicians. In radiation medicine, as in other fields of medicine, there is an emphasis on approaches that help make patient treatments more personalized through multimodality imaging, radiomics techniques, machine learning and adaptive radiation therapy. This presentation will provide a brief account of the McGill Medical Physics Unit's programs. We will illustrate our activities with a few examples: radiation physics and dosimetry, the development of new treatment technology and the evolution in our research towards addressing cancer treatment personalization. We will also briefly touch upon the current and future role of medical physics research, the clinical impact it has, IP translation and the evolving requirements for training of next generation medical physicists.