Radiotherapy Medical Physics and Technology

Research is a core component of the Department of Radiotherapy and a primary function for all medical physicists and support staff.

The medical physics and technology research group supports a diverse and wide-variety of research-related activities from fundamental pre-clinical studies, to clinical development and technological implementation, to education. The medical physics and technology group assumes the lead research roles in a few key areas, including:

Automated Treatment Planning

Research has resulted in the development of the well-known automated planning program iCycle, which automatically generates the best possible treatment plan based on a wish-list of dosimetric objectives. On-going innovations in this area include extensions into automated planning for the CyberKnife as well as in Brachytherapy. 

Precision and Adaptive Radiotherapy

Stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT) and Stereotactic Radiosurgery (SRS) are performed using one of two in house CyberKnife devices. On-going innovations in this area include the application of adaptive radiotherapy such as plan-of-the-day for cervix, bladder, pancreas, and oligometistatic disease thanks to our one-of-a-kind dedicated in-room CT on rails.

Biology Image Guided Radiotherapy 

From basic research to clinical studies, assessing the merits of incorporating functional or biological imaging into treatment targeting is currently an on-going multidisciplinary research item.

Interventional radiotherapy 

Radiation delivered superficially via internal sources (i.e. Brachytherapy) or in combination with the application of Hyperthermia techniques compose our interventional radiotherapy research, which is actively on-going.

Proton therapy

The medical physics and research group takes actively part in the research program of the HollandPTC R&D consortium. Key projects are automated treatment planning for proton therapy, robustness evaluation and optimization of treatment plans, online-adaptive proton therapy, and MRI-only treatment planning for ocular melanoma.

Education

A core component throughout our research lines is education, either through medical physicists in training programs (Klifios), PhD tracks, internships, or offering courses to bachelor and master’s students enrolled in technical medicine at TU Delft or through the ESTRO school.

In additional, the medical physics and technology group has supporting roles in areas of

• Radiobiology, Radiosensitization and DNA Repair
• Quality of Life after radiotherapy
• Palliative clinical research
• Radiotherapy clinical trials 

Prinicpal investigators

• Sebastiaan Breedveld, PhD
• Ben Heijmen, Prof PhD
• Jeremy Schiphof-Godart, PhD
• Mischa Hoogeman, Prof PhD
• Steven Habraken, PhD
• Inger-Karine Kolkman-Deurloo, PhD
• Steven Petit, PhD
• Gerard van Rhoon, Prof PhD