Choonik Lee

Choonik Lee, PhD

Associate Professor
Director of Brachytherapy Physics

UH B2C432C
1500 E. Medical Center Dr
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-5010

734-764-7147

Clinical Contacts

Administrative Contact

Biography

Choonik Lee is a board-certified therapeutic radiologic physicist by the American Board of Radiology and an authorized medical physicist in High Dose Rate (HDR) brachytherapy by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

Dr. Lee received his PhD in medical physics from the University of Florida. He completed his post-doctoral residency training in medical physics at the UF Health Cancer Center – Orlando Health (Formerly known as M. D. Anderson Cancer Center Orlando) before he joined the faculty of our department in 2009 as a clinical physicist.

Dr. Lee is actively involved in various clinical services including brachytherapy and image-guided external radiation therapy treatment planning and delivery. He is the lead physicist for a very active ocular brachytherapy program. He is actively involved in federal-funded and corporate-sponsored research projects.

Dr. Lee also serves as an associate director of the department’s medical physics residency program. He is also actively involved in radiation physics education of RTTs and medical residents. His professional affiliations include the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM), the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO), and the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). He is fluent in Korean.

Areas of Interest

  • Adaptive radiation therapy planning based on multi-modality imaging technique during radiation treatment
  • Monitoring the accumulated dose over the fractionated radiation therapy using on-treatment 3D images
  • Modeling of high energy photon beam calculation for improved accuracy
  • Secondary cancer risk estimation of the dose from out of the treatment field by using human computer models
  • Designing custom brachytherapy delivery devices for ocular tumors

Credentials

  • PhD, University of Florida
  • Board Certification: Therapeutic Radiologic Physics 

Grants

  • 5 R01 CA184153-05, (PIs: Eisbruch, A; Cao, Y), 03/2015-02/2020, NIH-DHHS: Functional imaging-directed adaptive therapy of head and neck cancer , Role: Co-Investigator with Effort.

Published Articles or Reviews

Selected from 32 publications

  • Lee C, Langen, KM, Lu W, Haimerl J, Schnarr E, Ruchala KJ, Olivera GH, Meeks SL, Kupelian PA, Shellenberger TD, Mellon RR. Assessment of parotid gland dose changes during head and neck cancer radiotherapy using daily megavoltage computed tomography and deformable image registration. Int J Radiat Oncol Biol Phys, 71(5):1563-1571, 2008.
  • Kupelian PA, Lee C, Langen KM, Zeidan OA, Manon RR, Willoughby, Meeks SL. Evaluation of image-guidance strategies in the treatment of localized prostate cancer. Int J Radiat Oncol Biol Phys, 70(4); 1151-1157, 2008.
  • Lee C, Jung JW, Pelletier C, Pyakuryal A, Lammart S, Kim JO, Lee C. Reconstruction of organ dose for external radiotherapy patients in retrospective epidemiologic studies. Physics in Medicine and Biology, 60(6): 2309, 2015. 
  • Demirci H, Saponara F, Khan A, Niziol LM, Lee C, Hayman JA, Comer G, Musch DC. Regression rate of posterior uveal melanomas following iodine-125 plaque radiotherapy. Middle East African journal of ophthalmology, 22(1): 103, 2015.

Web Sites

Locations

1500 E Medical Center Dr
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-5010

734-936-4320