AAPM 2018 Day 1

It was a a pretty good first day at the AAPM annual meeting.  The Nashville Music City Center is a nice convention center.  It’s large, has lots of rooms both big and small, nicely decorated and being downtown it’s in the middle of everything.  It’s like a small McCormick Place.

Started off the morning sitting in on a couple of task group meetings, mostly just to see what the status was. One of them is pretty close to publishing their report, and another was still working on the report.

A nice thing to see was lots of postings on the job board.  Lots of open positions, especially in diagnostic imaging.

The first lightning talk session (called SNAP orals) I went to was a Rad/Fluoro session where I learned about groups working on triple layer detectors for multi-energy radiographic imaging, and photon counting detectors for fluoroscopy.

The second session was on multi-energy CT.  Multi-energy imaging (outside of nuclear medicine) seems pretty hot these days.  Most of it is being done in CT, but based on what I saw in the previous session, it’s being applied to other modalities too.  It’s definitely an area that I need to learn more about.

A good chunk of the last part of the afternoon was spent wandering around the exhibit area.  Checked in on Radcal and RTI to see what the latest was with their test equipment.  Came across a company called Atirix who have a pretty nifty looking QC management program that might be just what I’m looking for.  Got a nice demo of the product at their booth, and it seems interesting enough that I’ll try to get the people at work interested in it, especially the mammography techs.

It appeared that for the afternoon break in the exhibit hall, there was beer for sale, which I failed to notice until after the break was over.  I was probably busy talking with people about products.

Wrapped the day up with a very enjoyable social put on by the Southeast AAPM chapter.  With so many faces at the meeting, it was a good chance to find some familiar faces at the meeting.