Department of Physics

News & Announcements

Colloquium: Calculating Skin Dose Following Fluoroscopically Guided Interventional Procedures (FGIPs) Using Different Computational Phantoms

11 April 2024 — This Friday, April 12 at 3:15 p.m. will feature Professor Rasha Makkia from the Medical College of Georgia, where she will present Calculating Skin Dose Following Fluoroscopically Guided Interventional Procedures (FGIPs) Using Different Computational Phantoms:

Determining the peak skin dose (PSD) accurately during fluoroscopically guided interventional procedures (FGIP) is crucial for assessing potential radiation-induced skin injuries and determining the necessary follow-up care for exposed patients. This study evaluates the accuracy of PSD estimation in FGIPs using geometrical and computational phantoms that mimic the dimensions of the imaged patient. A hybrid computational human phantom (HCHP) was developed using Rhinoceros TM 6.0, and three other computational phantoms with cylindrical, ellipsoidal, and semi-ellipsoidal geometries were created using Matlab software developed to calculate PSD for different computational phantoms. Dose-distribution mapping was performed on all constructed phantoms using Matlab software, adhering to the guidelines outlined in AAPM TG-357. Modeling the FGIP with the use of computational phantoms accurately reflects patient anatomy and can be useful in evaluating radiation PSD from FGIPs. The traditional method yields a greater difference against our fluoroscopy PSD measurements, while the HCHP calculation method resulted in comparable accuracy in calculating PSD to using computational phantoms, with the added computational power and time needed to create a patient-based human model.

The presentation will be held in room N109 of the Howell Science Complex building. Please join us via Webex if you are unable to attend in person.

20 March 2024

Dear Pirate Physics Supporter,

March 20 is Pirate Nation Gives, ECU’s annual spring fundraising campaign. We appreciate your support and participation in our work in the past and, today, on behalf of everyone in the ECU Physics program, I invite you to consider a gift of any amount to the Physics Priority Fund.

The fund was established several years ago to support undergraduate and graduate physics students. This year we plan to use the Physics Priority Fund in these ways:

  • Outfit the Physics Undergraduate Research and Collaboration Hub (PURCH). Everyone needs a space to do their work and collaborate with others, and undergraduate Physics students are no exception. But right now, they have nowhere to call their own. Therefore, we have given them a room to work on homework and projects and to collaborate on research. We are equipping the room with furniture, computers, and other items needed for a meeting, study, and computational physics space.
  • Support graduate student travel. It is very important for graduate students, particularly Medical Physics students, to attend professional meetings where they can make the contacts that lead to job opportunities. But we need help to pay for travel expenses for all our students. That is where the Physics Priority Fund comes in. We will use this fund to support graduate student travel to professional meetings to explore job opportunities or present their research.

Your support of the Physics Priority Fund will help us to fund these two important initiatives.

Pirate Nation Gives begins at midnight on March 20.

Click here to donate. From $5 to $50 or $500, your gift will make a difference.

Thank you in advance for your consideration.

Sincerely,
Jeff Shinpaugh, Chair
ECU Department of Physics

Colloquium: Creating Droplets of the Early Universe in the Laboratory with Nuclear Collisions

14 March 2024 — This Friday, March 15 at 3:15 p.m. will feature Professor Ron Belmont from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he will present Creating Droplets of the Early Universe in the Laboratory with Nuclear Collisions:

In the first few microseconds after the big bang, the universe was in a state of matter called the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Research into surprising effects found in collisions of a light nucleus with a heavy nucleus is one of the main pillars of present-day research in high energy nuclear physics, and the discovery of QGP droplet formation in these small-volume collisions has fomented major developments in relativistic hydrodynamics. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory has conducted a geometry scan, comprising collisions of three different systems with three different intrinsic geometries. The PHENIX collaboration found the intrinsic geometry to be manifest in the measured correlations, confirming QGP droplet formation, and published the results in Nature Physics in 2019. More recent results corroborate the clear geometrical dependence and also indicate different contributions from intrinsic geometry vs sub-nucleonic fluctuations in different kinematic regions. In this talk we discuss the latest experimental and theoretical results in the context of the geometry engineering program, and briefly discuss additional future measurements.

The presentation will be held in room N109 of the Howell Science Complex building. Please join us via Webex if you are unable to attend in person.