 becomes substantial.
Radke’s groundbreaking work in biomedical image processing is supported by CenSSIS, the Bernard M. Gordon Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems, a research center funded by the National Science Foundation and dedicated to developing new technology for identifying objects that are somehow obscuredfrom cancerous tumors under the skin to pollution plumes underground.
Radke was particularly interested in the computer vision and machine learning problems related to intensity modulated radiotherapy, or IMRT, a new technology for cancer treatment. Working over the last several years with Rensselaer undergraduate and graduate students, and collaborating with medical physicists at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Radke’s team has investigated IMRT-related problems for both breast and prostate cancer.
Radke and his students also have designed algorithms that can play a critical role in helping a medical physicist develop a radiation treatment plan once the tumor and critical organs have been outlined, a complex task that involves calculating the different angles and intensities at which radiation is beamed into the body. The goal, again, is trimming time.
“It can take hours for an expert to develop a radiation treatment plan, but if we can use our algorithms to provide a viable or near-viable plan in just a few minutes, that saves hours of a planner’s time, allowing him or her to do other important stuff,” he says. “We’re not trying to replace anyone with a computer, or shift the responsibility of patient care from doctors to a machine. We’re just trying to save people time by speeding up processes that are routine enough to be automated.”
Radke finds this work especially rewarding, and he continues to look for more applications in cancer treatment for the techniques he’s developed. “It feels good to see the impact, to talk with the people in the trenches who are actually treating patients and hear that the work I was doing has some real bearing,” he says.