Background and activities

Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Physics, NTNU, since December 2019 and part of the research group led by Prof. Kathrine Røe Redalen. Previous research was carried out at Tuebingen University Hospital in the group led by Prof. Daniela Thorwarth.

Research in the field of functional imaging guided radiotherapy

Modern treatment concepts and advanced technology allow for a very precise radiotherapy of patients with cancer. However, different tumor types such as advanced head-and-neck tumors are still associated to high rates of recurrence. Medical imaging techniques such as PET and MRI have great potential to identify cancer patients with poor response to therapy, and to help adapt the treatment and improve the response. For instance, PET and MRI offer the possibility to improve the delineation of tumor versus normal tissue and, thus, improve radiotherapy dose planning. Beyond that, different parameters can be derived from PET/MR images and used to characterize the tumor in terms of its biology. This can help to determine radioresistant subregions in the tumor, which may be prognsotic for the response to therapy or serve as a radiotherapy boost target in individual patients. Such imaging based adaptations of radiotherapy may in the future lead to a better treatment outcome. 

Our research addresses different aspects of integrating functional PET/MR imaging into radiotherapy. This includes:

  • Radiotherapy specific patient positioning solutions for combined PET/MRI, including PET photon attenuation correction for quantitative PET data analysis
  • Optimization of radiotherapy specific imaging protocols, e.g., to improve the geometric accuracy of diffusion-weighted MRI
  • New strategies to characterize tumors in terms of biology and radiation therapy resistance using multiparametric PET/MRI, machine learning methods and radiomics
  • Machine learning/deep learning of functional image data for automatic tumor delineation
  • Radiotherapy dose painting and tumor control probability modelling based on functional image data

 

Scientific, academic and artistic work

Displaying a selection of activities. See all publications in the database

Journal publications

Others

  • Winter, René M.. (2019) Multi-parametric functional imaging for personalized RT adaptations (Invited Talk). 50th Annual Meeting of the German Society for Medical Physics (DGMP) ; Stuttgart, Germany. 2019-09-18 - 2019-09-21.
  • Winter, René M.; Leibfarth, Sara; Boeke, Simon; Mena-Romano, Pamela; Krueger, Marcel; Cumhur Sezgin, Efe; Bowden, Gregory; Cotton, Jonathan; Pichler, Bernd J.; Zips, Daniel; Thorwarth, Daniela. (2019) Prediction of dynamic FMISO-PET voxel information by multi-parametric MRI features (Talk). 50th Annual Meeting of the German Society for Medical Physics (DGMP) ; Stuttgart, Germany. 2019-09-18 - 2019-09-21.
  • Winter, René M.; Leibfarth, Sara; Boeke, Simon; Mena-Romano, Pamela; Krueger, Marcel; Cumhur Sezgin, Efe; Bowden, Gregory; Cotton, Jonathan; Pichler, Bernd J.; Zips, Daniel; Thorwarth, Daniela. (2019) Principal component analysis for quantitative and robust analysis of dynamic PET/MR imaging data (Poster EP-2029). ESTRO 38: 38th Annual Meeting of the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology (ESTRO) ; Milan. 2019-04-26 - 2019-09-30.
  • Winter, René M.. (2018) Image quality assessment of a dedicated hardware setup for PET/MRI in radiotherapy treatment position (Invited Talk). Medical Physics Colloquium of the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) ; Heidelberg, Germany. 2018-11-07.
  • Winter, René M.. (2018) PCA for robust analysis of dynamic PET/MR imaging data (Talk). 2nd ESTRO Physics Workshop on Quantitative Imaging by the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology (ESTRO) ; Malaga. 2018-10-26 - 2018-10-27.
  • Winter, René M.; Leibfarth, Sara; Zwirner, Kerstin; Schmidt, Holger; Welz, Stefan; Schwenzer, Nina F.; La Fougère, Christian; Nikolaou, Konstantin; Gatidis, Sergios; Zips, Daniel; Thorwarth, Daniela. (2018) Image quality assessment of a dedicated hardware setup for simultaneous PET/MRI in radiotherapy treatment position (Talk). 49th Annual Meeting of the German Society for Medical Physics (DGMP) - 21st Annual Meeting of the German Chapter of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) ; Nuremberg, Germany. 2018-09-19 - 2018-09-22.
  • Winter, René M.; Boeke, Simon; Krueger, Marcel; Menegakis, Apostolos; Cumhur Sezgin, Efe; Wack, Linda; Reischl, Gerald; Pichler, Bernd J.; Zips, Daniel; Thorwarth, Daniela. (2017) Voxelbased analysis of FMISO-PET and diffusion-weighted MRI of two different HNSCC models in mice (Poster EP-1688). ESTRO 36: 36th Annual Meeting of the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology (ESTRO) ; Vienna. 2017-05-05 - 2017-05-09.
  • Winter, René M.; Schmidt, Holger; Leibfarth, Sara; Zwirner, Kerstin; Welz, Stefan; Schwenzer, Nina F.; La Fougère, Christian; Nikolaou, Konstantin; Gatidis, Sergios; Zips, Daniel; Thorwarth, Daniela. (2017) Hardware solution for simultaneous PET/MRI in radiotherapy treatment position: diffusion-weighted imaging in head and neck cancer (Poster). BiGART 2017: 15th Acta Oncologica conference on Biology-Guided Adaptive Radiotherapy (BiGART) ; Aarhus. 2017-06-14 - 2017-06-16.
  • Winter, René M.; Boeke, Simon; Krueger, Marcel; Stegen, Benjamin; Menegakis, Apostolos; Wack, Linda; Zips, Daniel; Thorwarth, Daniela. (2016) Integrated PET/MR imaging of tumor response to fractionated irradiation in xenograft models of human HNSCC - a feasibility study (Poster). Congress of the Center for Personalized Medicine (ZPM) Tuebingen ; Tuebingen, Germany. 2016-05-18 - 2016-05-20.
  • Winter, René M.; Leibfarth, Sara; Schmidt, Holger; Schwenzer, Nina F.; Zips, Daniel; Thorwarth, Daniela. (2016) Evaluation der Bildgebungseigenschaften einer Hardwareloesung fuer strahlentherapiespezifische Patientenlagerung in der PET/MR Bildgebung (Talk). 22nd Annual Meeting of the German Society for Radiation Oncology (DEGRO) ; Mannheim, Germany. 2016-06-16 - 2016-06-19.
  • Winter, René M.; Leibfarth, Sara; Schmidt, Holger; Schwenzer, Nina F.; Zips, Daniel; Thorwarth, Daniela. (2016) Evaluation of diffusion-weighted imaging properties of a RT-specific positioning solution for PET/MR imaging (Poster EP-1910). ESTRO 35: 35th Annual Meeting of the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology (ESTRO) ; Turin. 2016-04-29 - 2016-05-03.
  • Winter, René M.; Leibfarth, Sara; Gatidis, Sergios; Schmidt, Holger; Schwenzer, Nina F.; Zips, Daniel; Thorwarth, Daniela. (2015) Evaluation of imaging properties of a dedicated RT positioning solution for combined PET/MR imaging (Poster PD-0454, Poster Award). 3rd ESTRO Forum, Annual Meeting of the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology (ESTRO) ; Barcelona. 2015-04-24 - 2015-04-28.
  • Winter, René M.; Leibfarth, Sara; Gatidis, Sergios; Schmidt, Holger; Schwenzer, Nina F.; Zips, Daniel; Thorwarth, Daniela. (2015) Prototype hardware solution to allow for RT-specific positioning of HN cancer patients during PET/MR imaging - Evaluation of imaging properties (Poster). EMIM 2015: European Molecular Imaging Meeting (EMIM), the 10th Annual Meeting of the European Society for Molecular Imaging (ESMI) ; Tuebingen, Germany. 2015-03-18 - 2015-03-20.
  • Winter, René M.; Leibfarth, Sara; Paulus, Daniel H.; Quick, Harald H.; Gatidis, Sergios; Schmidt, Holger; Schwenzer, Nina F.; Zips, Daniel; Thorwarth, Daniela. (2014) Evaluation of a dedicated radiotherapy positioning solution for combined PET/MR imaging (Talk). ESTRO 33: 33rd Annual Meeting of the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology (ESTRO) ; Vienna. 2014-04-04 - 2014-04-08.