UI alumnus Jeffrey Snyder is no stranger to MRI machines.
Snyder, who received his doctoral degree from UI in 2023, dedicated his research to understanding and improving MRI-guided therapy systems. After graduating, Snyder moved back to the East Coast. Through his work, he hopes to enhance the efficiency of MRI-guided radiotherapies to improve cancer treatment.
Adapting to anatomy
Snyder received his undergraduate degree in physics from the State University of New York in 2014 before pursuing his master's degree at Stony Brook University. He received his master’s in 2016 in biomedical engineering, concentrating in medical physics.
Following his graduation, Snyder was accepted to UI Health Care’s Clinical Medical Physics Residency Program. Offered through the Department of Radiation Oncology, the 24-month training program prepares residents to practice independently as board-certified medical physicists
Although Snyder had been on the East Coast for a while, he made the trip to Iowa’s cornfields for a competitive program that only has four residents. During his time in the residency program, Snyder was introduced to Daniel Hyer, a professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology. Hyer quickly became a mentor for Snyder.
“Dr. Hyer is a great mentor. I really do owe a lot of the things that I’ve learned within the field and clinical practice to him,” Snyder reflected.
After graduating from the residency program, Snyder remained at UI as a physics faculty member for the Department of Radiation Oncology. Staying at UI was a key decision that allowed Snyder to explore advanced MRI-guided therapies. In 2019, UI Health Care became just the third hospital in the United States to receive a new technology called the MRI Linear Accelerator.
The MRI Linear Accelerator, also known as MRI-linac, is an MRI-guided radiation therapy system that uses both an MRI machine and a linear accelerator. The accelerator uses electricity to generate high beams of radiation. Combining these tools allows the MRI-linac to deliver radiation therapy with greater precision.
“It allows us to adapt patients’ treatment plans as their anatomy changes. For example, when you drink water, the size of your bladder changes,” Snyder explains. “We can see those things and that provides us the tools to adapt your plan based on how your anatomy looks.”
More adaptability and greater precision mean sparing more of patients’ healthy tissues. Prior to the MRI-Linac technology, some of a patient’s healthy tissue would be ruined or destroyed during the radiation treatment.
“Let’s say you have prostate cancer. We don’t just treat the prostate; we treat the prostate plus a little extra margin around it. We know the prostate is going to move a little bit, so the purpose of the extra little margin is to make sure that we hit the prostate the whole time,” Snyder,
With the MRI-linac, providers can take images every day to see how a patient’s anatomy has changed, removing the need for the extra margin and decreasing the radiation delivered to healthy tissue.
Accelerating the treatment
While still working at UI in 2021, Snyder elected to pursue his PhD in biomedical engineering, specializing in MRI-guided adaptive radiotherapy. Throughout his two years of research, Snyder explored how to use the MRI-Linac to improve radiation treatments.
MRI-Linac technology is still relatively new to the field, and providers are still developing and testing new treatment protocols. Data about its impacts on treatments and side effects is still emerging.
Snyder tested the MRI-linac's efficiency in several common cancer sites including prostrate, pelvic lymph nodes, pancreatic, and liver cancers. He specifically measured how quickly new treatment plans could be created for patients and how well the technology spared healthy organs.
“With most of my work, the focus was to show that we’re delivering less doses of radiation to these healthy tissues,” he says.
Snyder’s research also intended to address some of the limitations of MRI-Linac, including speeding up the delivery of treatment. Snyder’s group did this by developing a new delivery method where radiation is continuously delivered while the machine rotates around a patient.
They also designed a new, adaptive strategy to modify a patient’s treatment plan in real time to counteract the motion of the tumor. Snyder’s results indicated that the new techniques could create treatment plans twice as fast and reduce session times by over 35%.
Although his research supports using these new methods, Snyder also noted that his data would need to be followed by clinical trials to see how the MRI-Linac might translate into reduced side effects for patients.
Bench to Bedside
Snyder was the 2023 recipient of the Rex Montgomery Dissertation Prize, which recognizes a doctoral student whose research is related to disease prevention or translating research into clinical practice. For Snyder, the award acknowledged the impact of his work.
“It’s a nice honor for me when you know your research has become impactful. With the Rex Montgomery Prize, you know the translational piece from the bench side into the clinic, being recognized that my research can make an impact for our patients."
After graduating in 2023, Snyder moved back to the East Coast, where he currently is Yale’s Regional Chief Physicist and an Assistant Professor of Therapeutic Radiology for Yale Medical School. Snyder manages three of Yale’s cancer clinics. He spends half of his time doing administrative work and the other half in the clinic.
Yale currently does not have an MRI-Linac machine. Only a handful of US hospitals have access to the technology.
“The MRI Linear Accelerator is a great technology, but they’re still quite niche in the field. They are also expensive, so it’s hard for smaller community practices to be able to use them.”
Although Snyder no longer works with the MRI-linac machines, his research as a PhD student will continue to inform and advance treatment protocols and designs for this technology. As more hospitals adopt this technology, cancer treatments will continue to improve for patients around the country.