Dr Jason Dowling

Dr Jason Dowling

Research Project Leader / Research Scientist

Contact

Level 5 - UQ Health Sciences Building Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital
Herston QLD 4029

Tel: 61 7 3253 3634
Mob: 0418 654 284
Jason.Dowling@csiro.au

Projects

  • Advances in Prostate Cancer Radiation Therapy

Science Area

  • Imaging and Computer Vision

Biography

Dr Jason Dowling leads the prostate cancer radiation therapy project at the CSIRO Australian e-Health Research Centre at the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital, Australia. The main aim of his current work is to investigate the use of MRI in radiation oncology (focusing on prostate cancer). This has involved firstly the development of methods to automatically detect and segment organs of interest from MRI scans and secondly the development and clinical validation of methods to automatically assign electron density information from MRI (generating pseudo-CTs) for dose calculations (currently this is not possible as MRI scans lack the electron density information required to calculate radiation dose). Jason is experienced in the transfer of image and structure data between treatment planning systems and open source software (such as ITK) via DICOM-RT.

Jason previously worked on Image Quality Sensitive Watermarking of Medical Images project at the Australian e-Health Research Centre. His PhD work was supported by Cochlear Ltd , and researched mobility enhancement for visual prosthesis ("bionic eye") recipients. Jason's BComp(Hons) research was in the area of latent semantic indexing for information retrieval. C++ source code is available from this link.


Jason's interests include image registration and segmentation, medical physics, radiotherapy planning, human and computer vision, visual prosthetics , programming (mainly C,C++), information retrieval using latent semantic indexing , computer graphics (OpenGL/DirectX/ITK/VTK) and shotokan karate (JKA) .

Project web site

Full list of Jason's publications


Academic Qualifications

2007 PhD Queensland University of Technology
2002 BComp (Hons 1) Monash University
1999 BAppSc(Psych/Comp) Monash University

Recent Professional Experience

2007- High Precision MRI Based Prostate Radiotherapy
2006-2007 Medical Image Watermarking, CSIRO e-Health Research Centre.
1996-2006 Contract analyst/software engineer (Oracle/Microsoft, various sites, mainly database applications, warehousing and reporting software).

Achievements & Awards

2012 Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia/Cure Cancer Australia Foundation (CCAF) Fellowship
2009 1st Prize MICCAI 3D Segmentation Challenge for Clinical Applications: Prostate Segmentation, London 24th September.
2008 Invited speaker 38th Cambridge Ophthalmological Symposium, Cambridge University, September 2008. Topic: "Current and future prospects for optoelectronic retinal prostheses"
2002 Australia Day Award (Family Court of Australia - software development)
2002 Australia Postgraduate Industry Award

Grants

2011 Does the initial treatment plan predict doses delivered to normal tissues during prostate radiation therapy? Cancer Council NSW (RG 11-05). Peter Greer, Jason Dowling, James Denham & Olivier Salvado. Collaboration with Calvary Mater Newcastle Hospital/University of Newcastle. 3 yrs. $349,794.
2011 Development of high precision MRI based prostate cancer radiation therapy. Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia (Young Investigator Grant YI2011). 2 yrs. $300,000.

Student Supervision

2011+ Jidi Sun, PhD, University of Newcastle

Science Citizenship

2011 Associate Editor (Guest), Medical Physics
2011 MICCAI Prostate Workshop Organising Committee (Toronto, Canada)
2010 MICCAI Prostate Workshop Organising Committee (Beijing, China)
2010 Member Australia-Canadian Prostate Cancer Research Alliance
2009 CSIRO ICT Centre Conference Organising Committee (Sydney, Australia)
2009 5th International Symposium on Visual Computing (ISVC’09) ("Visualization Enhanced Data Analysis for Health Applications" track) Program Committee (Las Vegas, USA)
2007 MICCAI local planning committee member (Brisbane, Australia)
2007+ Member MICCAI Society
2006+ Book reviewer for the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) newsletter.
2006+ Member International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE)
2005+ Ad hoc reviewer for the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering; IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging; Medical Image Analysis; Journal of Imaging Science and Technology; Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine; Spatial Vision; Journal of Neural Engineering, Journal of Systems and Software.
1999+ Member IEEE: Computer Society; Engineering in Medicine and Biology

Links