John Kildea's Medical Physics Research Interests

Research Axis 1: Patient-Centered Health Informatics - translational research

Objectives:

(a) Improve the experiences and outcomes of patients,
(b) Develop SmartCare - Use patient-centered data and mHealth technologies for remote care and artificial intelligence research.
(c) Implement a framework for blockchain-based data donation for real-world evidence research

Opal is the flagship project of my patient-centered health informatics research.

Research Axis 2: ROKS (Radiation Oncology Knowledge Sharing) - translational research

 Objectives:

(a) develop knowledge-based and evidence-based radiotherapy treatments,
(b) use data to improve the experience and outcomes of radiation oncology patients.

Ongoing funded research projects include:

1. A study to improve prostate cancer radiotherapy by searching for a correlation between the actual dose delivered during radiotherapy and patient-reported outcomes (as opposed to planned dose and physician-reported outcomes),
2. A study to combine radiomics applied to CT images and NLP applied to clinical notes to predict pain in patients with bone metastasis,
3. Development of incident reporting software for radiotherapy incorporating semi-automated classification using NLP, and
4. Match patients using AI techniques for the purpose of sharing experience in the form of peer support using the Opal patient portal and for the development of synthetic data for virtual treatment (digital twins).

 
Research Axis 3:  NICE (Neutron-Induced Carcinogenic Effects) - fundamental research

Objective:

To study the production and radio-biological effects of unwanted secondary neutrons in radiotherapy.

This research incorporates radiation detection, Monte Carlo modelling and radio-biology. It is underpinned by a research collaboration between McGill University, Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and Detec Inc.

VERITAS telescope array in Southern Arizona