From cars to cancer: UH professor employs auto industry tools for tum...(l be of this size at this point. As...)

As a tumor changes, Dong said, radiation oncologists can reduce the radiation treatment volume.

"Say the tumor shrinks by half. Then you can reduce the target volume and spare the normal tissue," he said. "Your side effects will be reduced because you're adapting. The benefit is you're not compromising the treatment and still reducing the toxicity."

Dong emphasized the importance of high-quality visualization tools in his field.

"You need that object that 3-D representation to make your plan," he said. "This is a real human patient. It's not a theory. It's both."

Kamrani has a long history with visualization and rapid prototyping, a fabrication technique common in the auto and manufacturing industries.

"Rapid prototyping is a technology that allows the automatic construction of physical models and prototyping of parts directly from a three-dimensional computer-aided design model," Kamrani said. "Thin, horizontal cross-sections are used to transform materials into physical prototypes layer by layer."

Rapid prototyping, also known as solid free-form fabrication, has changed the face of manufacturing, he said.

"In traditional manufacturing, you design something, send it to a foundry, and they make it for you. Now, with rapid prototyping, you design something and send it directly to the printer," he said.

Back in Michigan, Kamrani prototyped valves and cylinders. Today, he's prototyping bones and organs.

"The concept is the same," he said. "When I came here, with the Texas Medical Center, it kind of came together. The industry is different here, so I started focusing on a particular problem: trying to create a three-dimensional geometry, going from valves to skulls and things like that."

Dong called Kamrani's idea of applying the auto prototyping tools to tumor modeling "novel."

"It can help us solve the problem. There's a
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