Planning Visit: Engineering and Medical Research Collaboration on the Dynamics of Human Thyroid

这项计划访问计划将为来自马萨诸塞大学的Yossi Chait博士提供差旅支持，以推进最近与意大利比萨大学医院健康物理科医学物理科主任Antonio Traino博士的在线研究合作。特雷诺博士是格雷夫斯病放射治疗领域的领先国际研究人员，重点是放射性碘剂量的最佳计算，他可以说是过去十年来该领域发表最多的研究人员。柴特？S博士的研究主要集中在反馈控制问题上，最近又通过数学模型对甲状腺碘代谢动力学进行了形式化分析。特雷诺博士的团队一直在收集在他们医院接受治疗的许多患者的活动动力学和质量减少的数据。这些数据在世界其他地方是无法获得的，它为华盛顿大学马萨诸塞州大学的研究团队提供了一个近乎理想的数据库，用于识别特定患者甲状腺模型中的关键机制和结构。这次访问的目的是克服我们各自学科(工程学和医学物理学)之间的内在差异，促进面对面的会议。预计这将推动我们在专业和个人方面的合作水平，在不久的将来，我们可以在欧洲和美国为这项工作探索众多资金来源。

This Planning Visit proposal will provide travel support for Dr. Yossi Chait, from the University of Massachusetts, to advance recent, online research collaboration with Dr. Antonio Traino, director of the Medical Physics Section in the Health Physics Unit at the University Hospital, Pisa, Italy. Dr. Traino is a leading international researcher in the area of radiation therapy for Graves' disease with emphasis on optimal computation of radioactive iodine dose, and is arguably the most published researcher in this field during the past decade. Dr. Chait?s research has focused on feedback control problems and more recently on formal analysis of thyroid's iodine metabolism dynamics through mathematical modeling. Dr. Traino's group has been collecting data on the dynamics of activity and mass reduction in many patients treated at their hospital. This data, not available elsewhere worldwide, offers the UMass research team a near ideal data base for identification of key mechanisms and structure in a patient-specific thyroid model. The objective of this visit is to overcome the inherent differences between our respective disciplines (engineering and medical physics) facilitating face-to-face meetings. This is expected to advance our level of collaboration, both professional and personally, to a point where in the near future we can explore numerous funding sources in Europe and in the USA for this line of work.