Medical Physicist Dr Price Jackson on AI and his Peter Mac journey
2 min read 22 March 2023
Meet Peter Mac Medical Physicist Dr Price Jackson, whose job you may have never heard of.
Working in both a clinical and research capacity, Dr Price is integral to the safe running of much of Peter Mac’s radiation and imaging equipment.
Peter Mac’s Medical Physics team work across Radiation Oncology and Medical Imaging, with some staff members working on research projects and supporting clinical trials.
Describing his role, Dr Jackson says, “we’re the tech people who know how the equipment works. When there isn’t a turn-key solution, we set things up.”
Dr Jackson started at Peter Mac 10 years ago as a postdoctoral researcher, developing dosimetry processes for radio-nuclear therapies in neuroendocrine cancer. Dosimetry is the process of measurement, calculation and assessment used to calculate radiation dose.
Later, he stepped into a more clinical role, testing and running the machines in Radiology, explaining “It feels good when we’re here to help the doctors when they have an idea…saying ‘yes we can do that’ and being there to set up the machines for whatever they need.”
For the last five years Dr Jackson’s focus has been on building image analysis tools to compliment clinical trials. He is interested in the emerging role of artificial intelligence (AI), which is being used more and more for image recognition and data analysis in healthcare.
Programs can be trained by looking at previous scans, learning from them, then using image and pattern recognition to analyse future scans for differences and abnormalities. The idea is to improve the speed and accuracy of scan assessment for future patients.
Peter Mac has an AI Working Group, which for over a year has been bringing together staff working with AI together to collaborate, share resources to improve all of their programs.
Dr Jackson is a member of the group and said it’s about, “bringing together different teams that are working towards the same ends”.
Some current research in Medical Physics is using AI analysis tools to predict treatment responses to prostate therapies. Another uses AI to categorise dose responses in radiation therapy.
Not all research in the field of medical physics surrounds AI though.
Another medical physicist at Peter Mac, Associate Professor Nick Hardcastle is leading a team designing and manufacturing a chair for patients to receive their radiotherapy in – with the aim to provide a more comfortable treatment option and reduce collateral radiation doses.
He says it could even bring radiation treatment - which currently requires lots of physical space and expensive technology - into more regional and rural areas.