The long term goals and specific aims of this proposal are to train young scientists and engineers to apply their knowledge of physics and engineering to the problems in diagnosis and therapy that are encountered in radiology, nuclear medicine and radiation oncology. Most people who have recently had a serious health problem realize the complexity and power of the devices employed in radiology and nuclear medicine. As patients it is likely that they would have had an x-ray CT, an MRI, ultrasound, a PET or SPECT scan, and if they were unlucky enough to have cancer, most likely there would have been radiation therapy from a electron accelerator. All of this hardware did not exist 30 years ago. With their complexities optimum application of these devices requires support from individuals who are trained in physics and engineering, who understand the hardware and its role in diagnosis and therapy. The focus of this proposal is the Biomedical Physics Interdepartmental Graduate Program at UCLA. This program provides all trainees with general didactic and practical training on all the types of diagnostic and therapeutic hardware common to diagnostic radiology and therapeutic radiation oncology. During the research for the Ph.D. thesis, each trainee will become an expert on one or more of these systems. The typical research projects may involve developing new or improving current diagnostic systems or using the current systems in a novel way to extract new or more precise diagnostic information from the system under study. The projects in radiation oncology generally involve new methods of radiation therapy and improvement in the accuracy of delivery of the radiation close to the tumor while minimizing the dose to healthy tissue. The UCLA Biomedical Physics Interdepartmental Graduate Program has had an exemplary record in training individuals for these roles at the predoctoral and postdoctoral level. It has the programmatic infrastructure in place for the program, it has a rich and varied research environment, but most important, it has a dedicated and outstanding faculty.
