McGill.CA / Medical Physics Unit / People / Faculty & Staff

John Kildea

Associate Member

Medical Physics Unit, McGill University

Other appointments:

Medical Physicist, McGill University Health Centre 

Associate Professor, Gerald Bronfman Department of Oncology

Associate Member, Department of Physics

Associate Member, Department of Biomedical Engineering

Scientist, Cancer Research Program, RI-MUHC

Summary:
  • Assistant professor
  • Medical physicist
  • Lead, Opal Health Informatics Group at the RI-MUHC
  • Scientist, RI-MUHC
  • Vice-chair, Canadian Partnership for Quality Radiotherapy
  • Chair, Advisory Committee of the Canadian National System for Incident Reporting - Radiation Treatment

Positions available:

New: Software developer positions available with the Opal Health Informatics Group

Research positions available for strong candidates in health informatics, neutron dosimetry, and radiobiology - Postdoc, PhD, MSc and undergraduate projects.

Please contact John Kildea at john dot kildea at mcgill dot ca

Personal webpage:

depdocs.com/jkildea

Address:                           

Cedars Cancer Centre, Medical Physics, DS1.7141
McGill University Health Centre - Glen Site
1001 boul. Décarie
Montréal, QC H4A 3J1

Telephone:

514 934 1934 ex 44154

E-mail:

john.kildea at mcgill.ca

Education:

B.Sc: Queen's University Belfast (Physics, 1998))

Ph.D: University College Dublin (Astrophysics, 2003)

M.Sc: McGill University (Medical Physics, 2010)

Postdoctoral research: McGill University (Astrophysics, 2003-2006), Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (Astrophysics, 2006-2008)

Clinical residency: McGill University Health Centre (Radiotherapy physics, 2010-2012)

Visiting scholarships: Universität Leipzig (1996), Alaska Pacific University (1997), University of Arizona (2006-2008), Trinity College Dublin (2014)
Teaching:

Research focus:

Opal Health Informatics Group (O-HIG)

I lead the Opal Health Informatics Group at the RI-MUHC. O-HIG is the research team that designed, developed, clinically implemented and actively supports the Opal patient portal at the MUHC. 

Opal is an award-winning patient empowerment app and associated clinician-facing software that provides patients with access to their medical data and questionnaires to report patient-reported outcomes. Clinicians get access to clinician-facing software that provides waiting room management tools and a live dashboard to view patient-reported outcomes.

Within the O-HIG, I lead a team of 20 employees and three graduate students who are continuously adding improving and adding new features to Opal and expanding its use to patients and clinicians within the MUHC and into several other hospitals in Montreal and across Quebec.

Our research team is building blockchain-based data donation into Opal (Kayla O'Sullivan-Steban and Anton Gladyr) as a well as an AI algorithm to match cancer patients for peer-support (Aixa Andrade).

Radiation Oncology Knowledge Sharing (ROKS) 

The ROKS group is undertaking informatics research projects in radiation oncology in which the retrospective data of patients previously treated with radiotherapy are used to predict treatments and outcomes of new patients. 

Our research projects include comparing actual and delivered dose in prostate radiotherapy (Haley Patrick), predicting pain in patients with bone metastesis using natural language processing and radiomics (Hossein Naseri). natural language processing to semi-automate incident report classification in radiation oncology (Felix Mathew), and use of a DVH Registry to assess pediatric craniospinal irradiation (Esteban Sepulveda).

Neutron Induced Carcinogenic Effects (NICE)

The NICE research team is examining the biphysics underlying the energy dependence of the neutron radiation weighting factors.

Our various research projects are using a combination of DNA-scale Monte Carlo modelling (Logan Montgomery and James Manalad), experimental irradiations (Felix Mathew and Logan Montgomery), and radiobiology (Felix Mathew) to examine the biophysics underlying neutron dose deposition in himan tissue.
Sources of Funding
  • NSERC
  • CFI
  • Canadian Space Agency
  • Oncopole
  • Medteq
  • Rossy Cancer Network
  • Hospital foundations

Key Recent Publications:

(see Google Scholar for complete list)

Chu et al., "Acceptability of a Patient Portal (Opal) in HIV Clinical Care: A Feasibility Study" Journal of Personalized Medicine (2021)

Mohsen* et al., “Exploring Cancer Patients’ Perceptions of Accessing and Experience with Using the Educational Material in the Opal Patient Portal” Supportive Care in Cancer (2021). 

Sepulveda* et al., “Implementation of a DVH Registry to provide constraints and continuous quality monitoring for pediatric CSI treatment planning” Journal of Applied Clinical Medical Physics (2020).

H. Patrick* et al., "A Canadian Response to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Pandemic: Is There a Silver Lining for Radiation Oncology Patients?." Advances in Radiation Oncology 5.4 (2020): 774. 

H. Patrick*, et al., "Reduction of inter-observer contouring variability in daily clinical practice through a retrospective, evidence-based intervention." Acta Oncologica (2020): 1-8. 

F. Mathew* et al., “Development of a passive gold-foil nested neutron spectrometer to validate the active current-mode He-3 measurements in a high neutron fluence rate radiotherapy environment.” Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A, (2020). 

F. Mathew* et al., “The impact of treatment parameter variation on secondary neutron spectra in high-energy electron beam radiotherapy.” European Journal of Medical Physics (2020). 

C. Lund* et al., “A microdosimetric analysis of the interactions of mono-energetic neutrons with human tissue”, European Journal of Medical Physics (2020).

L. Montgomery* et al., “A novel MLEM stopping criterion for unfolding neutron fluence spectra in radiation therapy”, NIMA (2020).

J. Kildea, et al., “Design and development of a person-centered patient portal using participatory stakeholder co-design”, JMIR, (2019)

 

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