Oscar Matousek and Phoebe Ling’s Talks Win 2nd and 3rd Place at 2024 AAPM Young Investigator’s Symposium

UCBNE graduate students Oscar Matousek and Phoebe Ling, two 1st-year PhD students and departmental fellows, won 2nd and 3rd places at the 2024 Young Investigator’s Symposium of the Northern California Section of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine that was held last week at UC Davis. This annual event allows students, postdocs, and residents in radiological sciences, radiation oncology, and biomedical engineering to showcase their research. 

Oscar Matousek presented his research on “Uncertainty Quantification of 3D Compton Image Reconstruction for 225Ac Daughter Nuclei Using a Gaussian Process Prior” which is a collaboration with Jaewon Lee, also a NE PhD graduate student and Dr. Emily Frame, a former NE PhD student, all under the mentorship of Professor Kai Vetter. This work aims at providing new means in gamma-ray imaging and image reconstruction to quantitatively study the biokinetics of the new generation of radiopharmaceuticals, specifically targeted alpha therapy and to allow to reach the full potential of these methodologies in curing cancer and other diseases.

Phoebe Ling presented her research on “Brachytherapy source position verification” which is a collaboration with Professor Ke Sheng and Professor Qihui Lyu from the Department of Radiation Oncology at UC San Francisco and is part of the recently established medical physics certification program with the department of Nuclear Engineering at UC Berkeley. Phoebe’s research aims to enhance the accuracy in brachytherapy by introducing external markers that can be imaged during the procedure to ensure the correct location of the radionuclide used to treat cancer.