Say ‘aloha’ to Rice duo
Nuclear cancer-treatment advance sends undergraduates to Hawaii

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Try not to feel too bad for undergraduates Jessie Huang and Travis Brannan. All their hard work this summer to improve cancer treatment has gotten them a whole lot more work.

That it happens to be the presentation of their efforts at a conference in Hawaii — well, that’s just tough luck.

	An image from the lab of Rice professor Pablo Yepes that model the path of proton radiation in treating prostate cancer. Yepes’ Rice lab has created a program to increase the speed of designing treatment plans for patients.

Both Rice undergraduates have received grants to attend the third Joint Meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Nuclear Physics and the Physical Society of Japan in Waikoloa, Hawaii, Oct. 13-17. They’ll represent their mentor, Pablo Yepes, a senior faculty fellow in physics and astronomy at Rice’s Bonner Nuclear Laboratory, when they present a talk on calculating proton radiotherapy doses for cancer patients.

“It’s very, very sad,” Yepes said. “They’re going to have to miss some classes.”

Huang and Brannan have spent months tweaking Yepes’ computer program, the Fast Dose Calculator (FDC), which can tell doctors how much of a dose is enough for patients undergoing proton therapy, a rare but highly effective type of cancer treatment available in only a few of the nation’s medical facilities.

One of them is Houston’s University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, where radiation physicist Wayne Newhauser has been working with Rice to maximize the program’s potential. While proton therapy minimizes damage to healthy tissue, calculating the precise dose to give patients has been problematic. Newhauser has greatly increased the accuracy in estimating doses to minimize damage to good tissue, but until now the process has been very slow, taking three to four hours to calculate a single treatment plan.

With FDC, Yepes and his students have made such analysis 100 times faster while adapting it to a standard format for medical information. “We essentially take a CT scan of a patient and use that as the input for our calculations,” Yepes said. “The whole game here is to maximize the radiation in the tumor and minimize it everywhere else.”

A secondary part of the project will analyze neutrons emitted by the proton beam, which can also damage tissue. “Dr. Newhauser is looking at the whole neutron bath now, how much radiation the patient is getting,” Huang said. “We’re implementing the neutron calculations in our algorithm, and it actually seems to work pretty well.”

The project was supported by a seed grant from Rice’s John and Ann Doerr Fund for Computational Biomedicine.