Date: Tuesday 9 December 2026 – 15:00 (Europe/London)
Speaker: Tom Hrinivich, Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology and Molecular Radiation Sciences, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Faculty
Abstract
Approximately half of all cancer patients would benefit from radiation therapy as a component of treatment. Radiation therapy uses targeted ionizing radiation to kill cancer cells while sparing normal tissue. Proton radiation therapy is a specialized form of radiation therapy that makes use of megavoltage proton beams to target tumors while sparing normal tissue by modulating the proton beam energy and position to place the dose peak inside the tumor, permitting unparalleled normal tissue sparing. Efficacy of this approach hinges on our ability to precisely localize the tumor and normal tissue using imaging, and digitally optimizing the proton beam parameters for each patient and tumor to achieve the therapeutic objectives. This optimization problem, referred to as “treatment planning”, is enormously complex and requires dedicated teams of skilled technicians to manipulate treatment planning software to both generate the initial plan for each patient, and subsequently “adapt” the plan as tumors and anatomy change over the course of treatment, which may last 5-6 weeks. AI holds enormous promise to not only automate the treatment planning process but permit new treatment planning capabilities that could significantly improve the therapeutic efficacy of proton radiation therapy for cancer patients, improving tumor control and reducing side effects. Our lab at the Johns Hopkins Proton Therapy Center has investigated multiple AI applications to solve problems in clinical proton radiotherapy, including reinforcement learning (RL) for proton pencil beam control, and large language models (LLMs) for interpretation of physician treatment directives and “end-to-end” proton treatment planning, among others. Results and clinical successes will be presented, followed by limitations, remaining challenges for the field, and opportunities for improvement.
Biography
Dr Tom Hrinivich is a Medical Physicist in the Department of Radiation Oncology and Molecular Radiation Sciences who specializes in proton radiotherapy and treatment planning at the Johns Hopkins Proton Therapy Center in Washington DC.
He completed his PhD in Medical Biophysics at Western University in London ON, Canada, followed by a residency in clinical medical physics at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore MD, where he investigated image-guidance for prostate and cervical cancer radiotherapy.
Dr Hrinivich's research focuses on image-guided radiotherapy and treatment plan optimization, making use of on-treatment images to guide radiation and reduce side effects for cancer patients.