10/16 – Jie Deng, UT Southwestern Medical Center
Biomedical Engineering Seminar
October 16, 2026
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
BME Seminar in SEO 236
Address
851 S Morgan St, Chicago, IL 60607
Calendar
Download iCal FileSpeaker:
Jie Deng, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Radiation Oncology
UT Southwestern Medical Center
Title: Bridging MRI and Radiotherapy: A Career Journey from Diagnostic MRI Physics to MRI-for-Radiotherapy Physics, with a Focus on Clinical Translation in MRI-Guided Radiotherapy
Abstract: The first part of this talk traces the career journey from diagnostic MRI physics to MRI-for-radiotherapy physics, highlighting the unique role of a dedicated MRI physicist within radiation oncology. This role bridges important technical and clinical gaps by integrating expertise in MRI physics, protocol optimization, QA/QC, image quality, and clinical translation, while serving as a key liaison among clinicians, researchers, physicists, engineers, and industry partners.
This section will also provide an overview of the current status of MRI in image-guided radiation therapy, introduce major MRI-guided radiotherapy (MRIgRT) technologies and clinical workflows, and discuss how the integration of MRI into radiation oncology has enabled important advances in treatment guidance and adaptive radiotherapy.
The second part of the talk focuses on diffusion-weighted MRI (DWI) as an example of this translational challenge and its potential role in biologically guided adaptive radiotherapy (BIGART). DWI is particularly attractive because it is noninvasive, repeatable, and sensitive to tissue microstructure, with the potential to detect treatment-related biological changes before measurable anatomic tumor regression occurs. However, its application in radiation oncology—particularly in online MRI-guided radiotherapy—presents challenges beyond those typically encountered in diagnostic imaging.
This talk will outline a translational roadmap for advancing DWI from a promising quantitative imaging technique to a clinically actionable BIGART tool. The central message is that successful translation requires acquisition, reconstruction, distortion correction, quantitative modeling, uncertainty assessment, workflow integration, and clinical validation to be considered as a connected pipeline. Through this framework, DWI and other quantitative MRI techniques may ultimately support more biologically informed, personalized, and adaptive radiation therapy.
Host: Dr. Weiguo Li
Date posted
Sep 4, 2026
Date updated
Sep 4, 2026