Facilities

Facilities are provided by the Medical Physics Dept. of the Cross Cancer Institute (CCI), the University of Alberta and University of Alberta Hospital.

The Cross Cancer Institute is Northern Alberta's comprehensive cancer centre. It supports Cancer research, training and clinical services. One of the clinical programs at the CCI is Radiation Oncology, the use of high energy photons to kill cancer cells. Some of the equipment used for Radiation Oncology at the CCI includes Varian linear accelerators, the Gamma Knife system (located at the University of Alberta Hopsital), the locally developed linac-MR system, an othovoltage x-ray machine, and high dose rate and pulsed dose rate brachytherapy systems. See this link Radiation Oncology Facilities for a more comprehensive list.

Comprehensive diagnostic equipment is available, including CT, MRI, SPECT and PET-CT imaging systems. All three MRI units; a Siemans 1.5T MRI, Philips 3T MRI/MRS and 9.4T animal MRI/MRS are on-site. The cyclotron / PET facility was installed in 2002-2004. The cyclotron is part of the the Centre for Biological Imaging and Adaptive Radiotherapy. Follow the links for a more comprehensive list of equipment in three clinical areas:

Mechanical, Electronics and Computer Resources

The CCI has excellent facilities for the fabrication and maintenance of equipment required for research activities and clinical needs.

The machine shop is well equipped. New equipment recently acquired includes a Fusion3 F400 3-D printer.

A range of electronic equipment is available for making dosimetric measurements. This includes a Sun Nuclear dosimetry system that replaced a Wellhofer dosimetry system, a landauer microstar TLD reader, a PTW Beamscan MR, an Octavius dosimetry system and various ion chamber and solid state detectors.

A number of physical and virtual computers running Windows and/or Ubuntu Linux are available for the short-term use of visitors, graduate students and faculty. In addition, two linux Rocks Clusters and several desktop computers with GPU cards installed are available for specialized compute intensive simulations including AI research. The first cluster consists of a head node and 3 computer nodes, each with 512GB of memory and 4 AMD Opteron 6376 Series processors. Each processor has 16 cores for a cluster total of 192 calculation cores. The second cluster consists of a head node and 4 computer nodes, each with 256GB of memory and 4 AMD Opteron 6376 Series processors. Each processor has 16 cores for a cluster total of 256 calculation cores. Both clusters are currently setup to run EGSnrc, BEAMnrc and Penelope simulations. A separate Ubuntu server is a test environment for the TOPAS particle simulation tool. The GPU enhanced desktops have Nvidia GPUs.  All computers are tied to the AHS local area network (lan) with gigabit ethernet for sharing of resources.

The computation resources are maintained by a staff of two department IT personel.

The Medical Physics Department has a capable staff of Technical Equipment Officers (TEOs) in the Technology Management Group (TMG) that manage the service life of most electrical and electronic equipment at the CCI. This group is divided up into two specialties, one group services the treatment equipment such as the Varian linear accelerators and Linac-MR unit and the other group services diagnostic and lab equipment.