×
 Physics at Virginia

Krishni Wijesooriya

Ph.D., 1999, College of William and Mary
Professor of Physics and Professor of Radiological Physics

Biological and Medical Physics

Research Interests

Development and study of techniques for improved tumor localization/delineation, tumor motion corrections, reduce toxicity, and better patient safety in radiation therapy.

 1 Monte Carlo algorithm to predict post radiation therapy lymphocyte kill based on a patient's anatomy, and radiation therapy  plan.
 2 New imaging tool to improve targeting during radiation therapy delivery. Development of technology to use this technique as a diagnostic imaging tool which will be complementary to CT, MRI, PET, PET-CT, and SPECT-CT.
 3 New radiation therapy delivery machine, with much better dosimetry, and lower out-field doses, and higher beam energies with no neutron production.
4 Real-time independent software that compare the plan machine parameters to the delivered machine parameters  for  each control point for any dynamic treatment with Multi Leaf Collimator (MLC) for VARIAN Linacs.  When  the resulting  difference is  above a certain pre-set threshold value,   the  Linac will be prompted  to shut the beam off.  This will greatly improve patient safety.
5 Novel software to quantify and correct for the motion during radiotherapy treatment for Lung cancer, Breast cancer, and Liver cancer patients.  This involves accessing the log files to obtain the beam on time for each control point, and coinciding the respiratory signal with delivery, and reconstructing the delivered, motion affected 3D dose, pre-planning 4DCT/deep inhalation breath hold CT and pre-treatment imaging (kV orthogonals or CBCT) at the treatment table.