Author: Eugene

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Suggestion to airlines

Anyone who’s been to an airport recently will notice that the major airlines have installed those self check-in terminals. The idea is that you swipe your credit card so they know who you are and it spits out your boarding pass. Sometimes it doesn’t work, so you have to enter another piece of information, like your ticket number. Sometimes that still doesn’t work so you enter some other piece of information like the flight number. And if that doesn’t uniquely identify you to the system, you’re stuck standing in line waiting for a ticket agent to issue you a boarding pass.

So, airlines, if you’re going to do this, you need to make sure it’s much more robust and that it works for everyone. There’s not much point in implementing the check-in terminals if it’s going to result in long lines of hundreds of people who end up having to see the one or two ticket agents you only have on duty because you’ve reduced staffing (because the check-in terminals are supposed to be “more efficient”).

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Stuck in airline hell

So this was my day yesterday after the AAPM Summer School ended.

13:45: Arrived @ airport. Self check-in didn’t work. Need to stand in long line.
14:10: Stuck in check-in line from hell. Only 2 ticket counter people. Good rant material for Blog. Waiting 40 min for ticket clerk to help one person.
14:35: Hour later. Finally checked in. Off to gate.
14:52: Flight to Charlotte delayed 1 hr due to weather. Will miss connecting flight to Charleston. Need to find out details on next flight.
15:12: Waiting in another line to see about getting rebooked.
15:26: Flight to Charlotte now scheduled to arrive @ 7PM in Charlotte .
15:42: Charlotte flight scheduled to leave @ 17:30. Later 19:55 flight to Charleston should be doable.
15:52: Should have taken my keyboard out of my bag before checking it.
16:02: Found one of those PalmOne airport stores.
16:19: Found book called How To Be A Canadian. Had to buy it.
17:36: On the plane at last!
19:03: Landed in Charlotte.
19:14: Flight to Charleston delayed too. Argh. C Concourse very moldy smelling. Keep getting busy signals trying to call Y.
20:09: On the plane at last.
20:15: Eek. Lots of babies on this flight. Hope they’re all sleepy. With my luck today, they’re all awake, cranky and screaming.
20:36: Still on the plane. Still on the ground.
20:40: Still on the plane. In the air now.
21:22: Finished the book. Mildly amusing and easy read.
21:35: Landed in Charleston.
22:30: Just when I thought I was home free. No luggage. Crap.
23:00: Arrive at home finally.

It was supposed to have been a flight that left Pittsburgh at 4PM and got me back to Charleston at 7. That flight out to Pittsburgh was probably a sign of what I could have expected on the way back home.

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AAPM Day 4

The last full day of AAPM, and I’m ready to head back. Unfortunately I have to stay for the Summer School too. My brain’s pretty full now but I’m stuck till Sunday. Guess I’ll have to make some more room in there somewhere.

Last night’s AAPM Night Out at the Carnegie Science Center was a lot of fun. Such a cool place and so many fun things to do! I think it was a good time for everyone who went. I certainly had a good time playing with all the displays, like the lasers and the sound tube or the paper airplane wind tunnel. And the miniature railroad was pretty sweet too. A huge model train set with a whole bunch of tiny detailed movements in the scenery. The Robotics display was pretty cool too. Lots of people tried their hand at making the robot arm shoot free throws. CSC is definitely a fun place to go play.

Lacking any other AAPM sanctioned events, I went out with a couple of friends to catch the Pittsburgh Pirates play the Atlanta Braves. It was the first major league baseball game I had ever been to. An interesting event. Lots of people wandering around, watching the game, eating and drinking beer, and socializing. Pittsburgh lost 1-0 despite managing to get 11 hits versus Atlanta’s 5. Watching the pyroghy (or perogie as they spell it here) race was entertaining. At first I wasn’t quite sure what the heck those weirdo half moon things were, but then I realized they were pyroghys. Strange thing to race I thought, but hey, the crowd seemed to enjoy it. It was a pretty close finish. I think they might have had to go to the photo for the winner.

You know you’re a medical physics geek when you’re looking at the Jumbotron and wondering what the MTF characteristics of it are.

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Coming for MT 3.1

Looks like there are a lot of new things coming for MT 3.1 that we can look forward to in about a month or so. Things like scheduled posting and the ability to publish dynamically, which should help ease the pain of rebuilding. Also a plug-in pack with the winners from the plugin contest.

Can’t wait!

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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.