MPBE Summer Studentship: Incorporating spatiotemporal patterns of brain development into paediatric brain tumour radiotherapy planning to reduce treatment side effects

Name: Saarah Hussain
Degree: Medical Physics
Project Title: Incorporating spatiotemporal patterns of brain development into paediatric brain tumour radiotherapy planning to reduce treatment side effects
Supervisors: Dr Jamie Dean and Mohammad Amin Lessan

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As my 10-week summer placement with UCL Medical Physics & Biomedical Engineering officially comes to an end, I am incredibly thankful to have had the opportunity to contribute towards research in paediatric brain tumour radiotherapy alongside an amazing team of students and professionals alike.

The interdisciplinary nature of this project is perhaps what caught my attention to begin with; combining my interests in software engineering, coding, and physics, while also delving into the intricate world of healthcare. This multi-faceted project presented a stimulating and challenging opportunity which aligned perfectly with my career aspirations, offering an opportunity to truly make a meaningful impact.

The spatiotemporal variation in radiosensitivity is not accounted for in current treatment approaches – which may go some way in explaining why debilitating neurocognitive side effects due to radiation-induced brain damage occur all-too-often. At the very crux of this project lies the desire to exploit this spatiotemporal variation in order to design novel personalised planning approaches which can avoid the most radiosensitive regions of the brain.

My role thus involved engaging in a diverse range of data analysis tasks encompassing both human brain data and mouse brain data. During the early stages of my placement, I conducted a comparative study on the apoptotic sensitivity of various genes by analysing gene expression data obtained through RNA sequencing. Creating visual representations depicting this data across distinct brain regions and at different life stages offered valuable insights into the spatiotemporal variations in radiosensitivity within both human and mouse datasets. Particularly noteworthy were the similar patterns observed in both datasets; these findings highlight the comparability between the human brain and the mouse brain and, most importantly, their analogous responses to radiotherapy.

The latter part of my placement primarily involved investigating the mouse brain radiotherapy response with a view to comparing this with human radiotherapy predictions. This was made possible using a dataset with multi-modal imaging of proton-irradiated mouse brains – containing CBCT and MRI scans, a mouse brain atlas, and whole-brain tissue sections with histochemical and immunofluorescent markers for morphology. By using the DAPI-stained histology images to count the number of nuclei across different brain regions, we can compare nuclei count between irradiated and unirradiated areas and thus provide valuable insight into cell loss due to radiotherapy.

It has certainly been a challenging 10 weeks – yet it was this very challenge which ensured that every single day was as stimulating as the day before. Working closely with everyone in the lab has been the greatest pleasure and I have been incredibly fortunate to join such a friendly and welcoming team. My supervisors in particular have been amazing and I am incredibly grateful for their support, time, and guidance over the past 10 weeks as they helped me to navigate an entirely new domain and build an entirely new skillset.

To have really been immersed in the world of healthcare research has been such an enjoyable and rewarding journey. At its core, research is collaborative. I think that has been one of my key takeaways from the past 10 weeks – and contributing in discussions with researchers from leading universities all over the world has definitely shown me just how true that is. From the familiar world of Python, to the very unfamiliar world of QuPath, Napari, Cellpose, Fiji, and beyond… this placement has certainly been – above all – a learning experience.

I am eagerly looking forward to continuing on this journey and applying the valuable skills I’ve acquired during this placement throughout my degree and beyond – perhaps even as part of my own PhD one day. A massive thank you to UCL Medical Physics & Biomedical Engineering for giving me the opportunity to delve deeper into the world of Medical Physics and to contribute towards research that truly makes a difference.