Jenny Power
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My research focuses on "Mathematical modelling of radiotherapy cancer treatments". In particular, my work focuses on brachytherapy, a type of radiation treatment consisting of placing sealed, radioactive sources directly onto the tumour to be treated. Brachytherapy is most commonly used to treat cervical and prostate cancer. It has proven to be an efficient form of treatment as the radiation dose delivered can be focused on the tumour, and can be quite high, while limiting dose exposure of the surrounding normal tissue. However, a disadvantage of brachytherapy occurs when the tumour is close to a critical organ. In this instance, the radiation emitted from the sources may damage these critical organs, which could cause further health problems and complications. A challenge lies in positioning the sources such that the tumour is exposed to the required amount of radiation to kill it, but the critical organ is not exposed to excessive toxicity. This is what my research focuses on.
The aim of my work is to develop a numerical model which will determine the optimal placements of these radioactive sources such that the damage to the critical organs and surrounding tissue is minimal, but the dose on the tumour is still high enough to eradicate it. This problem is formulated as a PDE constrained optimisation problem. The main mathematical areas this project spans are partial differential equations (PDEs), inverse problems and PDE constrained optimisation, and the finite element method.
My hope is that in the future a sophisticated model could be created from this work which would aid clinicians in treatment planning. This would allow clinicians to create personalised treatment plans for patiexnts based on their own medical scans, which are mathematically proven to be the most efficacious.
I was fortunate to be selected as a finalist for STEM for Britain, where I was awarded the oppurtunity to present my research poster in parliament. Here is said poster, which I placed second in the mathematics category with.
[1] Arridge, S. R., et al. "A finite element approach for modeling photon transport in tissue." Medical physics 20.2 (1993): 299-309.
[2] Antil, Harbir, et al., eds. Frontiers in PDE-constrained Optimization. Vol. 163. Springer, 2018.
[3] Nath, R., et al. "AAPM Technical Report 51: Dosimetry of Interstitial Brachytherapy Sources: Recommendations of the AAPM Radiation Therapy Committee Task Group No. 43." Med. Phys 22 (1995): 209-34.
[4] Manzoni, et al. "Optimal Control of Partial Differential Equations." Springer, 2021.
[5] Wang, Lihong V., and Hsin-I. Wu. Biomedical optics: principles and imaging. John Wiley & Sons, 2012.