Congratulations to our graduate student Ethan Stolen and Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology James Sohn, who have just published a new paper in Technical Innovations and Patient Support in Radiation Oncology (tipsRO). This clinical journal is published by the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology (ESTRO) and reaches an international field of medical physicists and physicians working to improve radiation therapy.
Their paper represents a special collaboration between UChicago Medicine and Mayo Clinic in Florida, where the first carbon ion therapy facility in North America is under construction.
The paper looks at one of the key limiting resources in any heavy ion treatment facility, in which multiple treatment rooms are served by one synchrotron. Using two different optimization methods, including a novel genetic algorithm and Bayesian optimization, they showed that facilities could effectively optimize patient schedules to minimize the time patients have to wait for the beam to become available for their treatment room.
During this waiting period, patients are immobilized and often face the most anxiety. The authors showed that their optimization methods reduced this uncomfortable time from an average of half a minute to less than three seconds. Analysis of outliers (N = 100) showed that their optimization significantly reduced the maximum patient wait time from 3.52 to 1.33 min (p < 0.001), minimizing clinically relevant extremes.
Ethan is especially excited to be able to contribute to this new and growing field of heavy ion therapy.
Read the paper here:
Stolen, E., Yaddanapudi, S., Qian, H., Yoo, S. K., Lu, B., Park, J. C., Tan, J., Liang, X., Furutani, K. M., Beltran, C. J., & Sohn, J. J. (2026). Simulation and optimization of treatment schedule for multi-gantry heavy ion therapy. Technical Innovations & Patient Support in Radiation Oncology, 100383. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tipsro.2026.100383