I am actively engaged in several critical areas within our clinical operations, including treatment planning commissioning and maintenance, developing and updating clinical protocols, overseeing various informatics and coding projects, and performing specialized brachytherapy procedures. My research interests lie primarily in informatics, with a focus on creating an automated data retrieval system that supports both research projects and clinical objectives. I am also developing AI-driven methods for detecting patient setup errors and preventing the misadministration of radiation, aiming to enhance both safety and precision in radiotherapy. In addition, I am working on adaptive radiotherapy techniques and CSI workflows to make our treatments more responsive to individual patient needs.

Looking ahead, I am interested in harnessing clinically derived data and natural experiments to answer pressing clinical questions that could drive improvements in quality of care. This will offer students opportunities to participate in impactful projects that combine data science and clinical applications to advance patient care in radiotherapy.

Mr. Aguilera received a Bachelor of Science from Oregon State University and a Master of Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has been a clinical medical physicist for over thirty years.

Mr. Aguilera has worked at OSHU since 2015 and currently covers a rural radiotherapy facility 90 miles east of Portland at the Mid-Columbia Medical Center, in The Dalles, Oregon. He has interests in all aspects of clinical medical physics.

Dr. Erika Kollitz received her PhD from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich for her work on predicting out-of-field dose and second cancer risk using patient-specific whole-body computational phantoms. She then completed her residency at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where working with the Elekta Unity MR-Linac led to an interest in online adaptive radiotherapy.

Dr. Kollitz’s current interests include adaptive RT, medical physics education (patients, graduate programs, and residents), and other professionalism topics such as international equity, CAMPEP accreditation, and the ABR board certification process. She is actively involved in the AAPM and regularly participates in medical physics/STEM outreach programs. In the clinic, she contributes to the EBRT, TBI, and HDR brachytherapy programs

Current Responsibilities

• Started at OHSU in 2022
• General clinical obligations
  • Perform chart checks to make sure treatment patient receives corresponds with what was intended
  • Assess quality of treatment after changes in anatomy, setup, or planning parameters
  • Incorporating and assessing new technologies
• Teach MP 562: Physics of Radiation Therapy II

Current Clinical Responsibilities

• HDR brachytherapy physicist
  • Manage new patients and assess prior irradiation
  • Create treatment plans
  • Deliver treatments for each fraction
• Perform QA and commission new equipment
• Perform eye plaque implants/explants
• Planning and ordering sources
• On implant day, provide support in OR, supply sources, and perform surveys
• Provide radiation safety instructions to caretakers
• On explant day, retrieve source to send back to vendor
• Create post-plan to determine quality of implant

Research

• Past projects have covered texture analysis and radiomics
  • Assessing functional lung tissue change due to radiation
  • Quantifying effect of metal artifact reduction techniques on CT image quality
• Also includes implementation of deformable image registration in brachytherapy workflow