Professor Allen Holder

Math professor Allen Holder has a big goal. He wants to use his mathematics knowledge to improve cancer treatment, particularly in the ways radiotherapy treatments are designed and delivered, leaving healthy tissue alone while cancer cells are bombarded.

For the past two summers, his research affiliation with the Cancer Therapy and Research Center in San Antonio’s medical center has resulted in summer undergraduate research fellowships for seven Trinity students. Together, they are trying to design what he calls a “step and shoot system” of delivering radiation that bridges the world of academics with clinical communities. He has drawn upon several fields of mathematics (including optimization and combinatorics) along with engineering science and computer science.

“We’re after a one-button treatment plan,” says Dr. Holder, an associate professor of mathematics. He and his students are attempting to design a system that optimally decides how radiation travels through a patient to deliver a tumoricidal dose to the targeted tissues. Clinicians could “push a button and it’ll deliver good angles,” thus achieving a standard of care.

A companion goal is to design software that provides cancer treatment plans for doctors and technicians in rural areas. Tapping into the Internet, technicians could upload images from other anonymous cancer cases and tailor new treatment plans to the individual needs of their own patients. The software also would provide an academic approach to the field by creating a library of data. Although filled with real cases, patient information would be represented as “points in space” to maintain confidentiality and illustrate comparative treatment options.

At the outset of the project in the summer of 2004, Professor Holder was hopeful of completing the task quickly. “But every day there is a new problem,” he says. “It’s not a mathematical one but an implementation problem.” When the mathematical calculations seem to work, he and his student researchers often must tinker with software so that the information they load into a computer tells the equipment exactly what to do.

Early in the process, sophomore Josh Reese proposed a beam selection solution that the professor initially dismissed. As time wore on and nothing else seemed to work, Professor Holder started testing Josh’s idea. Guess what’s working now? Josh’s beam selection module will be central to a paper he is writing for submission to a scholarly journal.

Josh, who is from San Antonio and expects to earn a degree in mathematics in December, says, “I enjoy research a lot. The experience here has been great.”

Ryan Acosta of Coppell, Texas, graduated in May with a degree in computer science and will enter Stanford University this fall to study computational mathematics. After working two summers with Professor Holder, he says, “Look, we are some undergrads working on this project. So much of what we do has an impact. Josh had this one idea and worked through it with Dr. Holder.”

Josh adds, “Dr. Holder’s not even my adviser, but he’s going to walk me through the publication process so that I might leave Trinity as a published mathematician.”

With his computer science background, Ryan has concentrated on refining dosage calculations to simulate how a beam of radiation deposits a dose as it travels through the anatomy. To better understand his part of the project, Ryan said he spent many long days at the CTRC working with Dr. Bill Salter, director of medical physics. 

Another student, Bryan Brick, a senior from Richmond, Texas, is a double major in computer science and mathematics who is “working on the database side of things.” A catalogued database – similar to a library – would enable doctors, especially those in rural communities, to enter a Web site, change a few parameters, and see if existing treatment plans could be adapted to current patients. “It would be unprecedented,” he says.