Physics Colloquium

Dr. Ramin Abolfath, Yale School of Medicine

"Biological Responses of the Therapeutic Ionizing Radiation"

4:00pm, The John A. Wheeler Lecture Hall (RLM 4.102). Coffee and cookies will be served at 3:45pm in RLM 4.102

Abstract: Biological systems are exceptionally complex. In particular cancer progression and treatment present several challenges. In this talk I briefly review practical and computational approaches in multi-scale modeling of the therapeutic ionizing radiation interaction with biological systems. I introduce a novel approach to enable researchers to study the real-time DNA damage-repair pathway in-silico and the radio-biological effectiveness of the beam of photons, charged particles and heavy ions. Specific goals for potential enhancements in therapeutic applications and treatment planning will be sketched. For illustration of the methodology, the predicted population of double strand breaks (DSBs) along the proton track with the highest occurrence frequency in the Bragg peak and a quantitative comparison demonstrating the agreement between theoretical predictions and more recently reported experimental data designed for biological optimization of the particle therapy based on γH2AX counting will be discussed.