New Fellow joins OMA

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Charalampos Kalantzopoulos

Charalampos Kalantzopoulos is the newest Fellow to join the OMA project. He obtained his 5-year diploma in Mechanical Engineering from Technical University of Crete, Greece. He followed a MSc in Biomedical Engineering, KU Leuven, Belgium. Through this study, he collaborated with other institutes and companies including Imec, KU Leuven, UZ Leuven, Qaelum NV and Icometrix. He completed his Master’s thesis in collaboration with Icometrix, a Leuven-based company specializing on medical imaging processing and biomarkers. His topic was on 3D MRI processing on patients suffering from Multiple Sclerosis, to extract biomarkers for the disease located on the upper cervical spinal cord.

In November 2018 he began work as a scientific researcher in close collaboration with CNAO, Pavia and Polytechnico di Milano. The aim of his research is to provide motion modelling strategies for MRI data in order to quantify organ motion in abdominal area of the patients treated with particle therapy. This is done to quantify and correct for variations of the patients’ respiratory motion.

The main goal of the project is to explore deformable registration methods such as Optical Flow Algorithm to track the movement of the region of interest (ROI) (e.g. tumour, organs at risk). This will allow to define treatment planning margins based on the motion quantified by cine-MRI data, which will be compared with conventional margins defined on the 4DCT dataset.Both geometrical and dosimetrical comparisons will be performed.

The proposed approach will be validated relying on phantom simulations or by exploiting treatment data provided by the experts. Motion modelling techniques will be also considered to explore the possibility of updating the planning CT with the motion provided by MRI data.