Optimization of imaging as a risk-versus-risk framework of quantitative balance between clinical and radiation risk: a task-based implementation for liver CT in a large demographic population

Dr. Francesco Ria is a medical physicist and he serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Radiology. Francesco has an extensive expertise in the assessment of procedure performances in radiology. In particular, his research activities focus on the simultaneous evaluation of radiation dose and image quality in vivo in computed tomography providing a comprehensive evaluation of radiological exams. Moreover, Francesco is developing and investigating novel mathematical models that, uniquely in the radiology field, can incorporate a comprehensive and quantitative risk-to-benefit assessment of the procedures; he is continuing to apply his expertise towards the definition of new patient specific risk metrics, and in the assessment of image quality in vivo also using state-of-the-art imaging technology, such as photon counting computed tomography scanners, and machine learning reconstruction algorithms.

Dr. Ria is a member of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine task group 392 (Investigation and Quality Control of Automatic Exposure Control System in CT), of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine Public Education working group (WGATE), and of the Italian Association of Medical Physics task group Dose Monitoring in Diagnostic Imaging.

Areas of research interests include Bayesian hierarchical models for longitudinal data, Bayesian optimal designs, finite mixtures and Mixtures of Dirichlet Processes, Markov transition models, nonparametrics smoothing and density estimation, survival analysis for recurrent-event data, biomarker selection and detecting early ovarian cancer.