Health Physics Research Group

International collaboration

Department of Materials Engineering and Physics, Division of Physics and Biophysics, University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria

The modelling group of Health and Environmental Physics Department of MTA KFKI AEKI has been collaborating with the University of Salzburg for more than three decades in the field of lung modelling, radiation protection and radiation biophysics.

The cooperation has been materialized in the frame of European Community Projects (FP4, FP5, FP6) and several Austro-Hungarian TÉT Bilateral Projects. The work was also supported by different grants and fellowships (Marie Curie, Lise Meitner, EURATOM etc.). Visits from Hungary to Austria, from Austria to Hungary and meetings during international conferences helped the running of successful common projects.

This fruitful scientific cooperation resulted in more than 300 scholarly publications, out of which about 200 were published in highly ranked international peer reviewed journals.

The very first main achievement of this collaboration was the development of the Stochastic Lung Deposition Model (ST Model), which is one of the most or the most sophisticated lung model in the open literature. It is worth mentioning that merely the first 4 articles has about 240 citations to date. The model is under continuous improvements being extended to children, diseased airways, computation of mucociliary clearance and so on. In the envisaged project the ST Model will play a key role in the quantification of radio-aerosol deposition within the airways.

The two research groups developed several numerical algorithms and applied top of the art computational fluid and particle dynamics (CFPD) techniques to characterize the inhomogeneity of particle deposition in the human respiratory system.

Other major outcomes of this international cooperation concern lung dosimetry and microdosimetry, risk assessment and lung cancer modelling. In the frame of this work the Hungarian and Austrian groups were the first to publish many of the spatial and time correlations of different biological endpoints related to the inhalation and deposition of radon decay products.

Instituto Tecnologico e Nuclear, Lisbon, Portugal

Our co-operation with the Instituto Tecnologico e Nuclear (ITN) is relatively new. One of the PhD students from ITN, Ana Lucia Belchior, does experimental work related to radon exposure in accordance to our suggestions. Another PhD student will survey the areas of Portugal, which are interesting in the respect of radon and will apply our numerical models. Imre Balásházy will be one of their PhD supervisors.