Category: Meetings

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Live from Pittsburgh!

One cancelled flight and a delayed flight later I finally made it to Pittsburgh 7 hours after I left for the airport in Charleston. It was only supposed to be a two hour trip.

So far I like what I see of Pittsburgh, although I haven’t seen much except for the road between the airport and downtown. Pittsburgh has a very nice downtown area that is easily walkable. It’s a very hilly area, which is a nice change and sharp contrast to the flatness of Charleston, where the only hills you’re going to encounter are overpasses and bridges. Long riverfront areas make for a nice place to walk in the evenings. The convention center where the AAPM meeting is only a short 15 minute walk from my hotel, and there looks to be a lot of shops and interesting little restaurants very near by. And even better is that the hotel I’m in, The Renaissance Pittsburgh (besides being very posh and stylish), offers free Net access! It’s slow, but adequate. Faster Net access can be had for a price, but their free service is enough for my needs. The monitor on this ancient relic of a laptop I’m using (a P120 Dell Latitude XPi) is choosing this week of all weeks to flake out on me though.

Got here just before a baseball game started, so there were throngs and throngs of people around headed to the ball park. It’s quite the sight to look across the river and see a stadium full of people, and then to hear them roar when something good happens.

Tomorrow is the first day of the meeting, and I expect to be busy with committee and task group meetings most of the day.

Posted on

Headed to the AAPM meeting

This weekend I’m headed to Pittsburgh for a week for the AAPM‘s Annual Meeting and Summer School. This will be my first AAPM meeting and I’m looking forward to catching up with some friends there.

I’ve never been to Pittsburgh so it should be interesting, although I don’t know that I’ll have much time to check out much of the place. Probably just the area within walking distance of my hotel and the convention center. Looking forward to checking out Carnegie Mellon too, where the Summer School is located.

Gotta make sure I remember to bring my camera.

Hopefully I’ll be able to find a TV station there that carries Tour de France coverage, otherwise I’m going to miss the last week of the race.

Posted on

A guide to surviving RSNA

After you’ve gone to 2 or 3 RSNA meetings, you pick up a few tips on getting around and surviving the 4-6 days you’re there. So I thought I’d write about some of the things I’ve learned about RSNA survival.

Wear Comfortable shoes
Comfortable shoes are a must at RSNA. Your feet will be your primary mode of transportation, so forget fashion and forget looking good, unless you happen to enjoy having sore feet. At RSNA, you will do a lot of walking. You can easily cover a good 3-4 miles in a day just walking around McCormick Place, especially if you’re wandering through the two technical exhibit halls. If you’re not walking, you’re standing and either talking to someone or studying something.
Pace yourself
There’s a lot to see at RSNA, and if you try to do it all at once, you’ll end up burning out and exhausted.
Go early, leave late
Most people try to arrive at McCormick around 8ish. The Technical exhibits open at 10. If you didn’t get breakfast before McCormick, there’s a McDonald’s that offers pretty quick service, but lines quickly stretch outside the door after 7:30. The computer terminals also start getting crowded around 7:30-8. I like to arrive around 7, grab some breakfast at McD’s maybe (about the only time I’ll ever eat at McD’s), check my mail (plenty of open terminals, so theren’s no need to be rushed) and spend an hour or so studying some of the posters.
The Technical exhibits close at 5 PM, and that’s about when the exodus from McCormick begins. That’s also when the lines for the busses are the longest. You can easily spend 30-45 minutes standing in line just waiting for the bus. Instead of waiting in line, just head back to the poster exhibits and study a few more posters. Earn another hour of CE credits and then by the time you head back to the busses, the lines are gone and you’ll be on the bus about the same time as you would have been if you waited.
Explore
Plenty of things to see and do, not only at RSNA, but in Chicago.
Dress Accordingly
Everyone seems to wear dark or black suits/clothes, especially the people working the technical exhibits. So, if you want to be inconspicuous and blend in, wear dark clothes. If you want to be distinctive, stand out and make it easy for others to find you, wear something colourful.
Leave your coat behind
You’re walking around all day, and the last thing you want to do is be lugging around a heavy jacket all day. Yes, it’s November, and Chicago is cold in November. But about the only time you’re outside are the 5 seconds it takes to walk between your hotel lobby and the bus, and between the bus and McCormick Center. So, unless you have a nasty smoking habit (they make you go outside to smoke), the coat can be dispensed with. But if you insist on wearing one, there are coat checks where you can leave it. Then your only problem is remembering which coat check you left your coat at.
Leave your bag behind
Same advice goes for your bag/briefcase. All it will do is leave you with a sore and tired shoulder. If you happen to collect things through the day, there big roomy plastic bags available. Just grab one of those to hold your stuff in for the day.
Posted on

RSNA Day 4

It’s my last day here at RSNA. It’s a pretty light day, with scientific sessions just in the morning. That leaves my afternoon free to catch up on the technical exhibits.

This morning, I went to a refresher course on dual modality imaging and software based image registration. It was pretty interesting, and I learned a few very low-tech tips for doing image registration without needing expensive hybrid scanners or fiducial markers. Dual modality imaging (PET/SPECT CT in particular) is becoming an increasingly popular and valuable imaging method for diagnosing, especially for cases where the diagnosis from either modality is inconclusive.

The rest of the afternoon was spent wandering around the technical exhibits to check out some of the various offerings.

One new item was a (relatively) small corner called the RSNA Mobile Computing Pavillion. It was a collection of wireless, TabletPC, PDA and software vendors offering solutions for wireless and mobile computing in the radiology/healthcare environment. Got my first look at a TabletPC from Motion Computing. They’re pretty neat devices. I’m tempted to get one for my wife instead of a laptop.