Laura Smith Email & Phone Number

Southampton, United Kingdom

• Quality assurance and troubleshooting of linear accelerators (Versa HD) and IGRT/SGRT systems • Acceptance testing and commissioning of new equipment• Patient specific dosimetry measurements (Delta4, IQM)• Treatment planning and plan checking for a number of complex sites (Pinnacle3)• Developments; streamlining QA analysis, developing Python scripts to automate workflows• Collaborating with the Scientific Computing team to develop scripts for automation of treatment planning workflows, including QMS and version control• Software testing and quality assurance (ISTQB® Certified Tester Foundation Level v4.0)• Abstracts accepted at UKIO 2023 Congress & IPEM Clinical and Scientific Computing Symposium

Leicester, United Kingdom

Utrecht, Netherlands

For my elective training I chose to visit University Medical Centre Utrecht, an institute that are world-renowned for the development of the world's first MR-Linac and for their pioneering research into MR-guided radiotherapy. This innovation is going to transform radiotherapy treatments in the future by enabling on-line, soft-tissue based position verification, tracking and treatment optimization, ultimately improving local control. I performed small research project investigating the effect of the magnetic field on Gafchromic film dosimetry for the MR-Linac. Part of this work was presented at ESTRO 36 meeting. I had the opportunity to attend multi-disciplinary meetings and presentations, observe aspects of the commissioning of the MR-Linac in preparation for first in man treatment, shadow clinical physicists on duty and discuss a range of position verification problems. In addition, I visited the MR-Guided High-Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) facility, another potentially transformative technology, which is used for a range of therapies including breast cancer and prostate cancer treatment, as well as uterine fibroid ablation and palliative treatment of bone metastases.

Sutton, Surrey

This project involved investigating a simple DCE-MRI test object of affordable design that can reproduce uptake curves by using commonly available automated CA injectors. This project focused on investigating the object further and establishing the mathematical relationship between injection parameters and the shape of the curve.The shape of the uptake curves were investigated by altering injection parameters, fitting mathematical models the the data and extracting parameters using IDL software.Two abstracts accepted for presentation at ISMRM 2015 conference, entitled 'Application of mathematical modelling to a DCE-MRI phantom: predicting the shape of contrast agent uptake curves' and 'Assessment of system linearity and response to input parameters in a Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced (DCE) MRI phantom'.

Northampton

Darmstadt, Germany

I was responsible for implementing a new functionality into the treatment planning code. The radiotherapy planning target volume (PTV), encloses the clinical target volume (CTV), with anisotropic margins both in the beam direction, and laterally to account for possible uncertainties in the beam alignment, the patient position, and organ motion. I worked in a Linux environment, programmed in C, and utilised GSI's treatment planning program for ion therapy (TRiP), to plan treatments and doses. I developed a software package for direction specific volume expansion, and successfully implemented the package into the treatment planning software so that it is now available for all users at GSI to use in further treatment planning studies in the future.

Master’S Degree, Clinical Science (Radiotherapy Physics)

MSc project "Assessment of an ultrasound bladder scanner in prostate radiotherapy: a validation study and analysis of bladder filling.

Msci, Physics (Hons)

Education record