Physics or medical physics students are welcome to join a research project for their master’s or bachelor’s theses or for a diploma. At present, we offer thesis topics in the field of patient positioning, which is a central issue in radiotherapy. The precision of delivering radiation is still often degraded by limitations in achieving accurate patient positioning. Patient positioning systems based on optical imaging technology have recently been introduced to the market. They permit interactive correction of the patient’s position. Current research, conducted in cooperation with manufacturers of such systems, aims at evaluating and optimizing thesesystems to even better meetclinical requirements. Another problem to be solved with regard to patient positioning is that a target tumor may shift with respiration. This limits the precision of radiation planning especially for lung tumors. To deal with shifting tumors, we can use not only optical surface registration systems but also respiratory-controlled or optical-marker-based systems. One project being conducted by our departmentcompares and evaluates the potential of the different methods with the objective of optimizing them. Other prospective research topicscan be chosen from the fields of radiation treatment, biological irradiation planning, and dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging.

For informatics students, the Medical Physics Section offers research positions (bachelor, master, or diploma) in the field of motion correction. Research in this field aims at developing clinically applicable approaches to motion correction. These approaches are based on dynamically acquired images and address current problems in clinical radiation planning and image data analysis.