Martin James Murphy
Occupation:
Professor of radiation oncology specializing in the development of adaptive image-guided radiotherapy technology
Born: Washington DC
Education:
ScB in Physics, Brown University, 1973
PhD in Physics, University of Chicago, 1980
Career:
Dr Murphy studied nuclear astrophysics under David N Schramm at the University of Chicago and wrote his PhD thesis on experimental and theoretical studies of nuclear structure systematics relevant to stellar evolution. He subsequently took a postdcoctoral fellowship with the Nuclear Science Division of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. During that time he conducted experiments in nuclear projectile fragmentation at the 88” cyclotron and the Bevalac. In 1982 he became a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Physics at the University of Washington and continued experimental research into nuclear fragmentation using the accelerator facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
In 1985 Dr Murphy joined the Lockheed Space Sciences Laboratory in Palo Alto as part of the team developing the ANGAS imaging gamma-ray spectrometer for the Air Force Starscan satellite. Although the ANGAS project was cancelled before the spectrometer was completed, it produced a spin-off instrument that was used for ground-based and balloon-borne remote gamma-ray imaging. The imaging principles first developed for and demonstrated by this instrument are presently applied by NASA’s Ramaty High-Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager. Subsequently, Dr Murphy was instrument scientist for the Polar Ionospheric X-ray Imaging Experiment, which was the first instrument to acquire global images of auroral x-ray emissions. The instrument was launched in 1995 aboard NASA’s ISTP Polar satellite and acquired auroral x-ray images for ten years.
In 1992 Dr Murphy was recruited to join the initial system engineering group at Accuray Incorporated, a startup company formed by Dr John Adler of Stanford University to develop and build the CyberKnife®, a revolutionary new frameless image-guided robotic radiosurgery system invented by Dr Adler. This was the first radiation delivery system based entirely on image-guidance principles. Initially as manager of the image guidance development team and later as Director of System Development, Dr Murphy oversaw the design and implementation of the x-ray image guidance system, the acceptance testing of the first clinical CyberKnife at Stanford, and the early clinical treatments at Stanford beginning in 1994.
In 1995 Dr Murphy took a position as Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Stanford to continue to develop and expand the CyberKnife’s capabilities. With the support of an NIH R41 grant and a grant from the Stanford Bio-X program, he adapted the system to measure and track six-degree-of-freedom changes in the position of the cranium (using software that he developed and patented) and subsequently expanded the system’s tracking capabilities to locate and treat sites along the spine and in soft-tissue targets. During this time, Dr Murphy’s tracking developments enabled the first image-guided radiosurgical treatments of spinal lesions and tumors in the pancreas and lung. As part of those innovations, Dr Murphy reconfigured the Stanford CyberKnife to use amorphous silicon flat-panel x-ray image detectors in one of the first clinical implementations of that revolutionary new imaging technology.
Following upon his development work for the CyberKnife at Stanford, Dr Murphy was recruited in 2003 to the radiation oncology department at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he is presently professor. At VCU he has expanded his research interests to include deformable image registration and innovations in 3D and 4D CT reconstruction. He has pursued these efforts as the principal investigator of NIH R21 and R01 grants as well as a project leader for the VCU department’s NIH PO1 program project grant in adaptive image-guided therapy.
Dr Murphy has authored or co-authored more than 100 research papers in the leading physics, medical physics, and radiation therapy journals, as well as twenty book chapters on various facets of image-guided radiation therapy. He is the editor of “Adaptive Motion Compensation in Radiotherapy” (Taylor and Francis, 2011), which summarizes the current state of the art in real-time motion adaptation, as described by the leading experts in the field.
Publications [Up to 15]:
Staub D, Docef A, C Vaman, Murphy MJ, 4DCBCT reconstruction using a PCA motion model, Medical Physics 38(12), 6697 - 6709, 2011.
Brock RS, Docef A, Murphy MJ, Reconstruction of a cone-beam CT image via forward iterative projection matching, Med Phys 37 (12): 6212 – 6220, 2010.
Vaman C, Staub D, Williamson J, Murphy MJ, A method to map errors in the deformable registration of 4DCT images, Med Phys 37 (11): 5765 – 5776, 2010.
Murphy MJ and Pokhrel D, Optimization and evaluation of an adaptive neural network filter to predict respiratory motion, Medical Physics 36 (1): 40 – 47, 2009.
Murphy MJ, Wei Z, Fatyga M, Williamson J, Anscher M, Wallace T, and Weiss E, How does CT image noise affect 3D deformable image registration for image-guided radiotherapy planning?, Medical Physics 35(3): 1145 – 1153, 2008.
Murphy MJ, Balter J, Balter S, BenComo J, Das I, Jiang S, Ma C, Olivera G, Rodebaugh R, Ruchala K, Shirato H, Yin F, The management of imaging dose during image-guided radiotherapy, Report of the AAPM Task Group 75, Medical Physics 34(10): 4041 – 4063, 2007.
Murphy MJ and Todor DA, Demonstration of a forward iterative method to reconstruct brachytherapy seed configurations from x-ray projection images, Physics in Medicine and Biology 50: 2715 – 2737, 2005.
Isaksson M, Jalden J, and Murphy MJ, On using an adaptive neural network to predict lung tumor motion during respiration for radiotherapy applications, Med Phys 32 (12), 3801 – 3809, 2005.
Murphy MJ, Tracking moving organs in real time, Seminars in Radiation Oncology, Chen and Bortfield editors, Vol 14 (1), 91 – 100, 2004.
Murphy MJ, Chang S, Gibbs I, Le Q-T, Hai J, Kim D, Martin D, Adler JR, Patterns of patient movement during image-guided frameless radiosurgery, International Journal of Radiation Oncology/Biology/Physics 55, 5 1400 - 1408, 2003.
Ozhasoglu C and Murphy MJ, Issues in respiratory motion compensation during external-beam radiotherapy, International Journal of Radiation Oncology/Biology/Physics 52, 1389-1399, 2002.
Murphy MJ, Adler JR, Bodduluri M, Dooley J, Forster K, Hai J, Le Q-T, Luxton G, Martin D, Poen J, Image-guided radiosurgery for the spine and pancreas, Computer-Aided Surgery 5, 278 - 288, 2000.
Adler JR, Murphy MJ, Chang S, Hancock S, Image-guided Robotic Radiosurgery, Neurosurgery 44,1299 - 1306,1999.
Murphy MJ, An automatic six-degree-of-freedom Image Registration Algorithm for Image-guided Frameless Stereotaxic Radiosurgery, Medical Physics 24, 857-866, 1997.
Murphy MJ and Cox RS, Accuracy of Dose Localization for an Image-guided Frameless Radiosurgery System, Medical Physics 23, 2043-2049, 1996.
Awards:
Fellow of the AAPM
American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) Activities:
Chair of TG-75: “The management of Imaging dose during radiotherapy”
Member of TG-76: “The management of respiratory motion during radiotherapy:
Member of TG-104: “Image-guided radiotherapy technology”
Member of the Therapy Imaging Subcommittee
Avocations and Special Interests:
Dr Murphy maintains a long-standing interest in the history of science, and in particular the collecting of landmark books in physics, astronomy, engineering, and medicine. He is also an amateur trombonist and has played in a number of civic orchestras and semi-professional bands over the years.
Family:
Dr Martin J Murphy is married to Kathleen M Murphy. They have two children: Lauren A Murphy and Alexander S Murphy.