Nuclear Physics Seminars

Lymphocytes are a key component of the adaptive immune system. The presence of high numbers of lymphocytes, especially T cells, has been reported to be an indicator of good prognosis in many types of cancer. However, lymphocytes are highly radiosensitive and Radiation-Induced Immune Suppression (RIIS) means destroying existing as well as newly created lymphocytes. In the era of immunotherapy, predicting time-dependent immune levels could allow optimum time for immunotherapy administration. In this talk, I will present a comprehensive model to predict time-dependent absolute lymphocyte count (ALC) in blood for early-stage lung cancer patients following Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy (SBRT) treatment. This complex model includes blood circulation among blood-rich organs such as heart, aorta, vena cava, pulmonary artery, etc; intertwined with lymphatic circulation among lymph-rich organs such as spleen, bone marrow, lymph nodes, liver, lung, etc. The model was trained on a set of retrospective lung SBRT patients and tested on a set of ongoing clinical trial patients. The model shows good accuracy in both training and testing datasets, with room for improvement.