Our Science – Li Website

George Li, Ph.D.

Radiation Oncology Branch Staff Scientist (Contr) National Cancer Institute, NIH Bldg 10/CRC/Room B2-3561 10 Center Drive, MSC 1682 Bethesda, MD 20892 Phone:   301-451-8955 Fax:   301-480-1064 E-Mail:   ligeorge@mail.nih.gov

Biography

Dr. Li graduated from the University of Science and Technology of China (Hefei, P.R. China) with a B.S. degree in Chemcial Phyiscs in 1984 and a M.S. degree in Computational Biophysics in 1987. He worked as a faculty member in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Southeast University (Nanjing, P.R. China). He received a Ph.D. degree in Analytical Chemistry from Duke University in 1994, and completed postdoctoral training at the NCI in 1997. He rejoined the NCI as a contract staff scientist in 2001 and is currently working as a medical physicist, certified by the American Board of Radiology in therapeutic radiological physics

Research

Within the scope of Radiation Physics and Computer Automation, clinical medical physics research is conducted, collaborated with other physicist and physician in the ROB and in other institutions. Most research projects are identified and initiated based on clinical needs and/or hypothesis driven subject that are associated with clinical radiation treatment.

Image registration is a central technique for radiation therapy planning (RTP) with multi-imaging modalities and image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT) delivery. By the alignment of anatomical and functional images, such as computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and positron emission tomography (PET), comprehensive information about patient lesion and surrounding normal tissues becomes available for treatment planning. By the alignment of pre-treatment CT and planning CT images, patient setup accuracy can be significantly improved, in compression with conventional methods using skin marks.

A novel 3D volumetric image registration (3DVIR) technique has been developed at the ROB. This technique has shown its promising potential in both RTP and IGRT, including the one-tenth-of-a-voxel accuracy, improved registration performance, and less user dependency. Some advantages have been reported while many more are under investigation.


Fig. 1. Registration of PET(green)/CT(red) images and motion correction. (A) Original PET/CT image from a combined PET/CT scanner; (B) Motion corrected PET/CT image using 3DVIR, based on the homogeneity of color distributed on a volumetric anatomical landmark.

This page was last updated on 7/15/2008.