An early Christmas at work

It’s been a good year at work. I’ve managed to get the department to purchase almost all the things I put on my wishlist this year, and now my office is almost overflowing with toys and equipment waiting for me to find time to play with.
The latest delivery was a much anticipated RTI Barracuda survey meter. This is something I’ve had on my wishlist for a long time. It comes about as close to a ‘do it all’ device for us diagnostic physicists as anything else out there. The real reason that I really wanted one this year is because of this: the CT Slice Detector. It’s a 30 cm long chamber that’s supposed to provide dose information at each point along the length of the chamber. Instant dose profile information. Whoops, spoke too hastily without really knowing how the chamber worked. So it’s not exactly what I thought it was, but still gives the same information. After a little more reading about the CT-SD16, I discovered it’s actually 1 long chamber with two separate solid state detectors separated by 16 cm. Dose profile information is obtained by doing a regular helical scan with the chamber in the phantom so that the detectors are advanced through the beam. Seeing as how I have the annual surveys for our CT scanners scheduled for the next few Friday’s, the Barracuda came just in time too. I’m so looking forward to playing with this new CT chamber. Especially can’t wait to try it out on our flat panel CT scanner. Dose profile on the flat panel CT isn’t going to be as easy as I hoped, but I’ll figure out something to make it work.