SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING FAIR
Research Plan and/or Abstract for 2014

Category Award:   0 (GRAND AWARD)

Research Plan:

Abstract:
Radiation therapy is a type of treatment used in treating certain types of cancer. Although radiation can be effective in shrinking or destroying cancerous tumors, it often also damages and destroys healthy tissues. It is therefore very important that radiation therapy is well planned, which is the job of a medical dosimetrist. One critical step in the planning process is the identification of tumor boundaries. Although dosimetrists use MRI images, they also have to rely a lot on human interpretation to determine the tumor boundary. In this research project, I am working with some MRI images from the databases of ProCure, a proton beam radiation therapy facility for cancer treatment, to explore if some of the aspects of previous research that I have done can be used in tumor contouring. I am exploring the relationship between the grayscales, or levels of darkness, at various locations in the image and the location of tumors in those same images. The work done indicates that spikes in the histograms of grayscale values can be used to determine potential locations of tumors. Additionally, the grayscale values can be used to filter out the tumor portion from each layer and then put the layers together to form a 3-D model of the tumor.