In this episode we’re going to learn about cancer radiotherapy, the use of radiation to treat cancer. So many people are afraid that nuclear radiation causes cancer, and yes this is possible if you receive a sudden megadose of radiation, but it is very difficult to get enough just enough radiation to increase the risk of cancer while not getting too much dose and dying from acute radiation sickness.  In the real world, radiation is used to kill cancer cells and save lives. I’m going to interview one of the world experts in this field of medicine.

Dr. Blake Walters received an M.Sc. in Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto in 1992. He joined the Ionizing Radiation Standards Group at the National Research Council of Canada in 1994. He received a PhD in Medical Physics from Maastricht University, The Netherlands, in 2017.

With the NRC, Blake helped to develop new computational techniques to greatly improve the accuracy of cancer radiotherapy. This work helps to spare healthy tissue while maximizing the dose to the tumour. This work has been adopted in radiotherapy clinics around the world, and has become the gold standard for accurate radiotherapy planning.

Currently, he continues his work for the NRCC, developing and implementing Monte Carlo techniques to meet the increasingly complex demands of current radiotherapy technologies.  He is also the in-house physicist, specializing in dose calculations for low energy X-rays, for a company that designs and manufactures pre-clinical and clinical irradiators sold around the world.

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