News 2024

We are very happy to be part of the EU-funded project "UPLIFT": Upright radiotherapy: Learning, Innovation, Fellowship and Training. This project brings together more than 20 partner organizations from the European Union to educate the next generation of the experts in the field of upright radiotherapy. Armin Runz (Head of the Research Group "Medical Engineering") and Oliver Jäkel are responsible for the project no. 13 "Antropomorphic phantoms for upright treatment validation".

On 14 and 15 November 2024, the UPLIFT consortium came together at GSI in Darmstadt, Germany, for the official kickoff meeting of the project. Representatives of every supervising institution discussed the management of the UPLIFT action and presented their plans for their individual project.

Click here for more information.

This year's cooperation meeting of the multicenter study on adaptive radiotherapy of lung tumors (PUMA) took place on November 5th 2024 at the LMU Klinikum Campus Großhadern in Munich. The focus was on the exchange of information between the scientific projects of the respective sites in Heidelberg, Munich and Tübingen as well as the clinical trial, PUMA I. The first phase of this clinical trial was successfully completed. Experiences and results from the first phase are to be used for the further planning of the second phase of the clinical trial, PUMA II.

In addition to technical discussions, the annual conference also focused on informal exchanges in order to further intensify the cooperation between the participating clinics and research divisions.

Further information on the PUMA project can be found here.

On November 17, 2024, the Open Day for the 60th anniversary of the DKFZ took place. Interactive booths and guided tours, lectures and science shows were offered by various divisions to present their work.

Our department was represented with three interactive information booths. We presented our 3D-printed anthropomorphic phantoms and made radiation visible through small experiments. In addition, visitors could create an interactive radiation treatment plan on laptops and discuss it with our students. Furthermore, we offered a guided tour to the new patient area in collaboration with the Division of Medical Physics in Radiology (Head: Prof. Ladd) and the Clinical Cooperation Unit for Radiotherapy (Head: Prof. Debus). During the tour, we explained to visitors the treatment process from imaging to radiotherapy.

Many thanks to all those who visited our booths and took part in the five guided tours taking place throughout the day. And, of course, a big thank you to everyone in our division who was involved.

Together with Prof. Dr. Anke-Susanne Müller and Prof. Dr. Matthias Fuchs from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), our department has been awarded funding for the project "Ultracompact electron accelerators for internal radiotherapy (UCART)" by the Carl Zeiss Foundation as part of the "CZS Wildcard" funding program. The two-year project aims to develop a (sub-)millimeter electron accelerator that can be inserted endoscopically into the body to irradiate tumors directly in the body without damaging healthy tissue.

Further information is available here.

Together with the Division of Medical Physics in Radiology (Head: Prof. Mark Ladd) we organized a virtual event as part of the International Day of Medical Physics, which is celebrated annually on November 7th. Post-docs and PhD students gave an insight into their research work to inspire others for the field of medical physics.

In addition to good presentations, you always need a lot of technology and a great team to organize such a virtual event. Many thanks to Kristina Giske, Niklas Wahl, Anahita Bakhtiari Moghaddam, Christina Stengl, Margareta Metzner, Pamela Ochoa Parra, Jonas Mahnke and Marcel Schäfer.

Click here for more information about the program.

Happy International Day of Medical Physics!

The project "Development of a pregnant female phantom with fetus models for the assessment of secondary radiation in ion beam therapy during pregnancy" was recently approved for funding by the Wilhelm Sander Foundation. 

The Principle Investigator (PI) of the project is Dr. José Vedelago, (PI at the Heidelberg University Hospital (UKHD) in the Division of RadioOnkology and Radiotherapy (Head: Prof. Dr. Dr. Jürgen Debus) and Group Leader of the Research Group Translation Research for Ion Beam Therapy in our department at the DKFZ), with Prof. Dr. Oliver Jäkel (head of our division at DKFZ) as Co-PI. The main external cooperation partners are Dr. Patrizia Kunert and Sebastian Trinkl from the Federal Office for Radiation Protection (Bundesamt für Strahlenschutz; BfS).

Within this project, a postdoctoral position for Christina Stengl will be funded, to improve the secondary radiation measurements in the fetus during ion beam therapy of pregnant patients. With the results of this project, we hope to be able to consider many pregnant cancer patients that nowadays are not eligible to benefit from this treatment.

Click here for more information. 

We are very happy to announce the following awards for our colleagues awarded by the German Society for Medical Physics (DGMP) during the 5th European Congress of Medical Physics (ECMP) 2024 in Munich:

Dr. Iván Domingo Muñoz Molina received the 2nd Behnken-Berger Award for his PhD Thesis about "Assessment of linear energy transfer and relative biological effectiveness in proton-beam therapy and ion-beam therapy with Al₂O₃:C,Mg detectors".

Rebekka Kirchgässner received the Dietrich Harder Master Thesis Award 2024 for her thesis about "Detection of anatomical changes in an anthropomorphic phantom during carbon-ion radiotherapy by tracking of charged nuclear fragments".

And finally, Christina Stengl received the Poster Prize of the DGMP 2024 for her poster about "An abdominal phantom with breathing motion to optimize pancreatic cancer treatment with carbon ions".

Congratulations to all winners!

It was a real pleasure to host our 6th Summer School in Medical Physics during the last week of September 2024. We welcomed 50 national and international young researchers and students in Heidelberg. Further 20 participants attended the school virtually via Zoom. More than 20 national and international speakers contributed with their talks and provided insights into their current research topics.

Congratulations to all winners of our science slam and our poster session. We would like to thank our sponsors IBA, ADVACAM and PTW for their financial support.

For more pictures of the course, just visit our website.

We want to welcome our matRad users in Heidelberg to celebrate 10 years of matRad development with a matRad Workshop to share your work, ideas, and to hack away with us. The workshop will take place from Feb. 17th until Feb. 21st 2025. Thanks to the funds from DFG, there is a limited number of travel grants available to those who submit projects to be presented during the workshop.

Registration is open until Nov. 15th 2024. Click here for more information.

Our division joins the platform LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/medphys/

Follow us for news, updates and information about our research projects, courses or conference contributions. We are looking forward to see you online on LinkedIn.

On Sep. 9th 2024, Prof. Jäkel was invited for an online guest lecture at our partner institute in Thailand, the Chulabhorn Royal Academy (CRA). His lecture about "Current research trends in medical physics" was part of the "Seminar in medical physics and medical engineering" which is part of the International PhD Program in "Medical Physics and Medical Engineering" at CRA.

We are delighted to invite everyone to our Virtual International Day of Medical Physics 2024 at DKFZ on November 7th 2024. Together with the Division of Medical Physics in Radiology (Head: Prof. Dr. Mark E. Ladd) we are organizing the event as part of the International Day of Medical Physics (IDMP). 

More information follows soon on our website.

In June 2024 we welcomed two Chilean researchers to our division. Thanks to the financial support of the Health + Life Science Alliance Heidelberg Mannheim Prof. Beatriz Sánchez Nieto from our partner university, the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (UC), could visit the German Cancer Research Center for one week. During her stay, Prof. Sánchez Nieto could chair Session 6 about "In-vitro and in-vivo FLASH studies" which took place on June 19th 2024 as part of the FLASH Workshop 2024, organized by Prof. Seco (Head of the Division Biomedical Physics in Radiation Oncology). She was also invited to speak at our hybrid Medical Physics Seminar with a talk on Analytical model for personalized photon peripheral dose calculation in radiotherapy: second cancer estimation and impact on the immune system can now be considered in a clinical setting.

On June 26th 2024, Rosario Astaburuaga-García (Alumna in Medical Physics of UC and Heidelberg University and our division) presented her current PhD project about Single-cell analysis of radiation resistance in head-and-neck tumors: unraveling heterogeneity and molecular mechanisms during our hybrid Medical Physics Seminar.Rosario is a PhD student at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

We are delighted that two PhD students of our division have been recognized for their work:

Margareta Metzner attended the HGSFP Summer School 2024 in Molveno, Italy and won the 2nd Poster Prize for her current PhD Project. Visit and follow her LinkedIn Profile for more details and pictures.

Christina Stengl was invited to the 73rd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau at the Lake Constance to present her research project. She was selected as one of more than 600 young scientists from all over the world. Visit and follow her LinkedIn Profile for more information.

Congratulations to both winners!

In April 2024 we celebrated our long-lasting Cooperation in Medical Physics with Chile with several events. On April 23rd 2024, we started with a hybrid workshop on the topic of Radioresistance, hosted at the Heidelberg Center Latin America (HCLA) in Chile. After the workshop, we celebrated our 15-years funding given by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) with a ceremony with all people involved from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (UC) and from Clínica Alemana de Santiago de Chile (CAS).

Our 20-years cooperation with CAS was celebrated by a special grand round on April 24th 2024 and a hybrid symposium on Radioresistance, both events taking place at CAS.

More details and photos of all events are available here. 

From May 14th to 15th, our team members Dr. Kristina Giske and Richard Häcker from the research group Computational Patient Models, presented the medical physicist's perspectives of the newly initiated interdisciplinary research project, CLARITY, at the Helmholtz Imaging Conference 2024. Together with our collaborators, Dr. Daniel Lang and Prof. Julia Schnabel, we kicked-off the project in the historic setting of Alte Frauenbad in Heidelberg.

CLARITY is a collaborative research project between our Division of Medical Physics in Radiation Oncology (E040) and the Institute of Machine Learning in Biomedical Imaging led by Prof. Julia Schnabel (HMGU). This project, competitively selected in the Helmholtz Imaging Call 2023, aims to enhance anomaly detection and generative AI capabilities for predicting 4D respiratory motion trajectories in MR-guided, respiratory-gated lung tumor treatments. Supported by high-quality data and expertise of our clinical partners at Heidelberg University Hospital (UKHD), we aim to test modern AI technologies in radiation therapy with the goal of improving patient outcomes in the future.

Prof. Oliver Jäkel - Head of our Division - is invited for an online talk about "New methods in Radiotherapy: MR-guided" as part of the Online Advanced Course on Biomedical Imaging 2024. The whole online course is organized by the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Coimbra (FMUC) and UT Austin Portugal. During the course, participants will meet experts from MD Anderson Cancer Center (Texas, USA) as well as from the German Cancer Research Center.

More information about the course and the lecture by Prof. Jäkel is available here.

The registration of our 6th Summer School in Medical Physics 2024 about the topic Radiation Detector Concepts for Medical Physics is now open! The course is divided into an online phase from Aug. 26th to Sep. 22nd 2024 and a hybrid attendance phase from Sep. 23rd to Sep.27th 2024 in Heidelberg. All sessions of the hybrid attendance phase are available as Live Online Phase via Zoom. Participants can decide to attend the course 100% virtually or online and on-site in Heidelberg.

The summer school is designed for students on different levels (BSc, MSc or PhD students) as well as young scientists with a background in Physics, Medical Physics, Medical Engineering or similar. A science slam and a poster session with prizes are part of the course to encourage participants to present their own research.

More information (e.g. program, fees and application) is available here.

The recording of the lecture "Modern developments in radiotherapy" (in German) is available online. The lecture was given live via Zoom by Prof. Dr. Oliver Jäkel (Head of our Division) on April 8th 2024 as part of the Dialogue Week: "Innovation, Transfer and Research in Health and the Medical Industry - New Perspectives in Dialogue" of the further education platform suedwissen.de.

You can find more information in German about the dialog week on the suedwissen.de website.

Interested in a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship as part of the DKFZ Marie Curie MasterClasses? Prof. Oliver Jäkel (Head of the Division of Medical Physics in Radiation Oncology) – one of the DKFZ Principal Investigators – could be your future host.

If you are interested? For information how to apply, please follow the link:
www.dkfz.de/en/postdoc-program/Marie_Curie_MasterClasses.html Application Deadline is May 13th 2024! Additional information is also available on the following website: https://euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/210761 

At the end of 2023, the sub-projects (SP) at DKFZ within the ARTEMIS Project (Adaptive RadioThErapy with MR guided Ion beamS) have been finalized. The focus was on the following topics:

• Development of a rotatable patient capsule for positioning the patient in the MR scanner and in front of the horizontal beam-line as well as its test with volunteers;
• Algorithms for data analysis, image registration and generation of stopping power maps from the MRI data, to be used for plan adaption;
• Development of MR-compatible, anthropomorphic phantoms and automated optimization of MR-sequences for the study protocols;
• Development of a quality assurance protocol as well as investigations on the long-term stability of the MR scanner.

More information about the sub-projects is available here.

The ARTEMIS Project is a collaboration between the Department of Radiation Oncology and Radiotherapy (Head: Prof. Dr. Dr. Jürgen Debus) at Heidelberg University Hospital (UKHD) and the Division of Medical Physics in Radiation Oncology (Head: Prof. Dr. Oliver Jäkel) at DKFZ. The funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (FMER, grant number: 13GW0436B) ran at the DKFZ from August 2019 to August 2023. The funding at the UKHD (grant number 13GW0436A) ends in 2024.

A new imaging device, based on the CERN technology Timepix, is now being used on cancer patients. Scientists from the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) Heidelberg, the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the Heidelberg Ion Beam Therapy Center (HIT) at University Hospital Heidelberg (UKHD) are now conducting the first patient trials to help target cancer cells more accurately in ion radiotherapy of head and neck tumours.

The project is lead by Dr. Mária Martišíková, Research Group Leader of the Group Novel Detection Techniques for Ion Beams of our division. Read on here. 

Dr. Martišíková was also interviewed live on Czech TV as part of the International Women's Day on March 8th 2024. The interview in Czech is available online here.

On March 22nd 2024, Dr. Kristina Giske - postdoctoral researcher and research group leader of the group "Computational Patient Models" in our Division - was invited for a online special lecture about the topic "Towards a digital patient twin in radiation therapy - a walk-through of the fundamental interdisciplinary components". The special lecture was part of the Master of Science Program in Medical Physics at our partner institute Chulabhorn Royal Academy (CRA). The poster of the special lecture is available here.

As part of the virtual discussion forum of the further education platform www.suedwissen.de, Prof. Jäkel will give an online lecture on April 8, 2024 from 2:00 to 2:30 p.m. on the topic "Modern developments in radiotherapy" (lecture language is German). The lecture is aimed at anyone interested in the topic. Of course, experts from the fields of medicine, medical technology, medical physics and health are also cordially invited. As a provider of various further and advanced training courses in the field of medical physics and radiotherapy, we are happy to be part of the Health Week to provide information on current topics in our field.

 You can find an overview of our current courses at www.dkfz.de/medphys_edu.

Christina Stengl, doctoral student of our division, won the National Decade Against Cancer's Young Scientist Award for her doctoral thesis. In her doctoral thesis, she is developing a model to simulate respiratory movement in order to improve cancer therapy. The model can investigate the effect of breathing during radiotherapy on the tumor and the surrounding organs at risk from radiation.

Christina also received the Audience Award, which was presented at the ceremony on February 2nd, 2024 in Berlin.

Congratulations!

Further information is available here (in German only)