Conjoint A/Prof. Peter Greer

Biography

Associate Professor Peter Greer currently holds a full-time research position leading medical physics research at the Calvary Mater Newcastle Hospital and University of Newcastle. He graduated with a PhD in medical physics from the University of Adelaide in 2001.

His work broadly aims to improve the treatment of cancer patients with radiation therapy and enable high quality effective treatments.

In 2005 Peter began a grant funded research career and has since received $5M in research funding including NHMRC, Cancer Council NSW, Prostate Cancer Foundation Australia, and ARC grants. He has established a strong track record of translating research funding into successful outcomes. Several aspects of his research are currently being developed into commercial products for radiation oncology and medical imaging.

He has received several awards including Early Career Researcher of the Year from the Hunter Medical Research Institute in 2011 - the premier award for early career medical research in the region. He has 50 publications in the last five years including several invited review articles. Peter served on a NHMRC grant review panel in 2011.

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Research

Research keywords

• MRI based planning
• dose verification
• electronic portal imaging

Research expertise

Approximately half of all cancer patients receive radiation therapy. It is a major frontline treatment for cancer along with surgery and is often complemented by chemotherapy. High energy radiation beams are used to damage the DNA of cancer cells in solid tumours while minimising the normal tissue damage to surrounding organs. The radiation can be delivered externally using medical linear accelerators (teletherapy) or internally using radioactive sources (brachytherapy). Modern radiation therapy is extremely sophisticated with imaging techniques such as MRI, CT, PET used for delineating tumour targets, complex dose calculation algorithms to plan the treatments and highly tailored dose distributions delivered using intensity modulated radiation beams. Medical physicists play a key role in all aspects of radiation oncology and drive the development of improved technology and techniques through research.

Peter has been conducting research since 2005 to improve radiation therapy planning with MRI. In collaboration with CSIRO Biomedical Imaging Research Group at the Australian E-Health Research Centre he has developed the first atlas-based deformable image registration method to map realistic electron densities to MRI scans for dose calculations. This could lead to the use of MRI scans directly for radiation oncology prostate planning and adaptive treatment. This will reduce uncertainties in the planning of treatments and has been recently published in the leading international clinical radiation oncology journal.

In parallel with this, accurate prostate auto-segmentation methods using atlas based methods have been developed. This work won an international challenge for automatic prostate segmentation in MRI images (MICCAI, London, 2009). This work is critical for the use of MRI in adaptive radiotherapy planning and could lead to improvements in treatment targeting. He currently has an active research program using the state-of-the-art Calvary Mater 3T Skyra MRI scanner installed in April 2011 to improve radiation therapy planning. This scanner has recently obtained a Master Research Agreement with Siemens which will facilitate research in audiovisual biofeedback as well as the development of specialised sequences for lung imaging.

Peter is recognised as a world leader in the field of radiation dosimetry with flat-panel imaging devices, investigating methods to measure the dose received by patients during treatment. He published one of the major papers in this field which has been cited over 130 times. He has been twice the Scientific Director for the major international conference in radiotherapy treatment imaging. He is Track Chair for the radiotherapy verification stream for the World Congress on Medical Physics and Bioengineering in 2012. He has been awarded the Varian Prize for research in this field and is regularly invited to give presentations at national and international conferences and workshops. His reputation in this area has resulted in him currently being the only worldwide test centre to have the major linear accelerator vendors prototype imager design. This collaboration is improving these devices for dosimetry and developing software algorithms to enable their more widespread clinical use for dosimetry.

Publications (PubMed) [ Note this is an incomplete list ]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=greer pb

Collaboration

Current collaborations include:

• CSIRO E-Health Centre, Biomedical Imaging Group (MRI based treatment planning)
• CancerCare Manitoba (Real-time dose verification of radiation therapy treatments)
• University of Sydney (A/V Biofeedback for lung MRI imaging, dose verification for MRI-linac, Development of next-generation radiotherapy imaging devices)

Languages

• English

Fields of Research

Code	Description	Percentage
029903	Medical Physics	80
090399	Biomedical Engineering Not Elsewhere Classified	10
110399	Clinical Sciences Not Elsewhere Classified	10

Centres and Groups

Centre

• Hunter Medical Research Institute
• PRC - Priority Research Centre for Bioinformatics, Biomarker Discovery and Information-Based Medicine

Group

• Hunter Medical Research Institute - Information Based Medicine Program

Memberships

Body relevant to professional practice.

• Treasurer - Australasian College of Physical Scientists and Engineers in Medicine
• Accredited Physicist - Australasian College of Physical Scientists and Engineers in Medicine
• Ordinary Member - Australasian College of Physical Scientists and Engineers in Medicine

Appointments

Grant Review Panel Member NHMRC (Australia)

01/03/2011 - 01/12/2011

Awards

Research Award.

2010	Early Career Researcher of the Year HMRI (Australia) The premier award for early career medical research in the Hunter region
2010	Best poster prize Canadian College of Physicists in Medicine (Canada) Best research poster
2009	3D Segmentation Challenge for Clinical Applications MICCAI (United Kingdom) First Prize
2007	Best presentation in Radiation therapy Varian Medical Systems (Australia) EPSM-ABEC conference, 2007

Invitations

33rd National Conference Association of Medical Physicists of India, India (Invited Presenter)	2012
Ballina Relay for Life and Men of League Fundraiser Cancer Council NSW, Australia (Invited Presenter)	2012
EPID based QA World Congress on Medical Physics and Bioengineering, China (Invited Presenter)	2012
EPID for pre-treatment VMAT verification International Conference on 3D Dosimetry, Australia (Invited Presenter)	2012
Challenges for Verification of IMRT 16th International Conference on Solid State Dosimetry, Australia (Invited Presenter)	2010
Atlas based methods for MR dose planning RadAim Conference, Australia (Invited Presenter)	2010

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Administrative

Administrative expertise

Peter was Honorary Treasurer of the Australasian College of Physical Scientists and Engineers in Medicine, the professional body representing around 600 medical physicists and engineers working in medicine in Australia and New Zealand. He has been twice the Scientific Director for the major international conference in radiotherapy treatment imaging. He was Track Chair for the radiotherapy verification stream for the World Congress on Medical Physics and Bioengineering in 2012. Peter manages his own research group based at the Calvary Mater Newcastle, including staff supervision, management of budgets and reports.

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Teaching

Teaching keywords

• medical physics

Teaching expertise

Peter teaches medical physics courses at 4th year level. He has supervised many research higher degree students.