Abstract: Yttrium-90 (90Y) radioembolization is a minimally invasive technique for treating primary liver tumors, in which radioactive microspheres are injected into the hepatic artery to reach the tumor. The rationale is based on the fact that the tumor is supplied by the hepatic arterial tree, whereas the normal liver receives blood from the portal vein. It is well known that the type of microsphere used will result in a specific final spatial distribution after perfusion and thus in a particular dose distribution. However, there is no tool capable of reproducing clinical scenarios to explain the differences between microsphere types. In this talk, I will present the first step of a novel stochastic method to simulate the distribution of microspheres, which could potentially provide insights to understand the uncertainties inherent to this type of treatment.

About the speaker: I am from Málaga, Spain. I studied Biomedical Engineer at University of Málaga, where later I did a Master’s in Mathematics. Then, I moved to the north of Spain for doing my PhD at University of Navarra. I studied the impact of dosimetric uncertainties in lung SBRT. Within this period, I did a 7-month research stay at Netherlands Cancer Institute (Ámsterdam), in the Adaptive Radiotherapy Group. After my PhD, I was teaching Mathematics in the same University, for one year. Currently, I am doing my postdoc at Massachusetts General Hospital – Harvard Medical School, which started 7 months ago.