Medical imaging researcher; PhD project

Medical imaging researcher (PhD project)

Requisition

Location:

Louvain-la-Neuve, BE

Work regime:
Full-Time

Kind of contract:
Fixed Term Contract

For the European RAPTOR+ research project advancing Right-time Adaptive Particle Therapy Ofcancer , IBA is hiring an early-career Researcher (m/f) to investigate Novel CBCT designs for online imaging in proton therapy within a breath hold .

You will jointhe R&D department of IBA’s Proton Therapy division at our Belgian headquarters in the vibrant university city of Louvain-la-Neuve and register for the PhD program at the prestigious University of Leuven (KUL).

You will be part of a dynamic network of 18early-stage researchers within the Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Training Network scheme and willbenefitfrom a wide-rangingtrainingprogramorganized by the 17

European partners of the project.

Youwill uniquely benefit from both industrial and academic resources to advance this project, with supervision by both Dr. Sébastien Brousmiche, Senior CBCT research expert at IBA, and Pr. Edmond Sterpin, Associate Professor of Medical Physics at KUL, and access to both the Imaging Lab at IBA and the flagship PARTICLE proton therapy center at KUL.

By carefully selecting the energy of a pencil beam of proton particles, most of its energy can be released at the desired depth within the tissues of a patient suffering from cancer, specifically at the depth of their target tumour volume (see how it works ). Accurate positioning of the patient before the delivery of each treatment fraction is consequently crucial to ensuring the sterilization of cancer cells while minimizing toxicity to surrounding healthy organs.

This preparation may require adapting the treatment plan to account for any changes in the patient's anatomy.

As early as 2014, IBA was first to integrate its proton therapy systems with the Cone-beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) technology, an X-ray on-board system used to acquire volumetric scans of the patient’s anatomy (see how it works ). Beyond its use for patient positioning, the CBCT emerges as the cornerstone of the online adaptive proton therapy workflow, whose technological completion is pursued by Work Package #3 of the RAPTOR+ project.

Its image quality is benefiting from a continuous upgrade program at IBA to reach the highest standard of guidance, with both hardware and software improvements, and ultimately support the computation of adapted plans.

The CBCT reconstructs a single 3D image from hundreds of 2D projections acquired at all angles over a period of more than 1 minute. Unfortunately, even the finest algorithms won’t prevent this reconstruction from exhibiting artefacts in the case of any respiratory motion within the captured field of view.

The RAPTOR+ researcher at IBA will therefore investigate and devise new candidate designs for a CBCT imager enabling high-quality images within an acquisition time below a breath-hold (