Speaker
Description
Katia Parodi is since 2012 full professor and Founding Chair of Medical Physics at the Physics Faculty of the Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Munich, where she initiated a specialization curriculum in Medical Physics within the MSc in Physics. She studied Physics and Medical Physics at the University of Genoa, Italy, received in 2004 her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Dresden, Germany, and subsequently pursued postdoctoral research at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA. In 2006 she returned to Germany as tenured scientist and group leader at the Heidelberg Ion Therapy Center, obtaining in 2009 her Habilitation from the Heidelberg University.
Her research interests are in high-precision image-guided radiotherapy, with focus on advanced methods for delivery, imaging and in-vivo monitoring of pre-clinical and clinical ion therapy. For her work, reported in over 300 peer-reviewed publications, she received several recognitions, and an ERC Consolidator grant in 2016. In 2017-2018 she served as president of the German Society for Medical Physics. She is since 2021 the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Physics in Medicine and Biology, and since 2024 an AAPM Fellow. In 2026 she also received the Innovation of the Year award of the Italian Chamber of Commerce for Germany.
Summary
Since the first clinical treatments at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1954 (protons) and 1975 (heavier ions), the use of ion beam therapy has grown rapidly worldwide. Its potential clinical advantage largely stems from the favorable physical interactions of charged particles in matter, enabling highly localized energy deposition at the so-called Bragg peak. By modulating beam energy and steering, precise and biologically effective tumor coverage with improved sparing of surrounding healthy tissue can be achieved compared to conventional X-ray therapy. Yet, despite significant advances in accelerator technology, beam delivery, treatment planning, and image guidance over the last decades, the full clinical potential of ion therapy remains limited by uncertainties in dose delivery and incomplete understanding of underlying biological effects.
This talk will review the current status and ongoing research in advanced in-room imaging techniques aimed at reducing these uncertainties and enabling range verification and real-time monitoring for precision guidance and adaptive ion beam therapy. In particular, it will address advances in imaging modalities capturing the daily representation of the patient varying anatomy and its stopping properties, along with different techniques which exploit the detection of irradiation-induced secondary emissions in order to retrieve the beam stopping position in tissue, ideally in real-time during treatment delivery. Finally, it will also discuss new prospects for accessing information which can support treatment adaptations based not only on anatomy and beam range but also biological considerations.