AAPM Day 2

It’s been a pretty good meeting so far. Lots of good topics at the Continuing Ed and Scientific sessions today. Managed to meet up with a few friends too and arrange some times to get together and catch up.

Started off today with a CE session on PET physics and instrumentation. Basically a review of the innards of PET detectors and scanners. Nothing new, but the speaker did cover some more recent developments in PET/CT scanners. A good intro for physicists needing to learn about PET.

Second session of the day was one on Fluoroscopy and image perception given by Phil Rauch, one of my mentors at Henry Ford Hospital. An excellent talk on the clinical goals of fluoro imaging and touching on some aspects of image perception. I think the part of his talk on picking out signal from a noisy background really made an impact on the audience. I’ll have to get a copy of his presentation and use it for teaching our residents.

The AAPM President’s symposium was on the future of diagnostic imaging and radiation therapy. A very timely topic with some excellent speakers. More and more there is this new field emerging as a union of therapy and imaging. It’s not quite diagnostic imaging, but it’s not quite radiation therapy. You have things like image guided therapy and imaging for staging disease and monitoring therapy. You really see it in the number of radiation therapy centers opening up imaging departments. The use of PET/CT in oncology is a major driving force in bringing PET into hospitals, even though the technology has been around for 20 years now. I think diagnostic radiology and radiation therapy departments will start getting closer again in the coming years. Ironic considering that many radiation therapy departments emerged from radiology departments 30 or 40 years ago.

The afternoon was taken up by a science session and symposium on CT noise metrics. Interesting talks on various ways of measuring noise in CT imaging. Even though I haven’t made much in the way of meaningful contributions to the TG yet, I’m learning a lot more about CT just by being part of the task group.

The evening started off with the AAPM Awards ceremony and reception. Congrats to my friend Stephen Steciw for being part of the group that won the Farrington Daniels award for best dosimetry paper in Medical Physics. Then after the reception it was a bit of a HFH physics resident reunion dinner with some former fellow residents and physicists. It was a good time and really nice getting caught up.

Looking forward to another good day tomorrow.