Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.
Please join the Coastal SC Lab Retriever Club as it hosts a free seminar about our Labradors and all of their skin issues. We’ll address food allergies, itchy & flaky coats, those problem ears and much more! The seminar is presented by Dr. Randy Thomas, board certified dermatologist.
When: September 15, 2007
Time: 4-6 PM
Where: El Bohio/Pour House (1977 Maybank Highway, Charleston, SC)
First day of the Summer School is over. Today’s sessions were all pretty good and very informative. There’s a lot of NCRP 147 related stuff in my head and I’m thinking it would be cool to see if I can write up a web-based tool for doing shielding calculations based on NCRP 147. It’s easy enough to implement in a spreadsheet so it should be doable in PHP.
The rest of the summer school is all about shielding for radiation therapy, which isn’t something I’m terribly interested in, but might be interesting to learn about. I doubt I’ll ever have to do a shielding design for a therapy unit, but it’s always good to know what kinds of things the other side needs to think about.
I may skip a few sessions and go wandering about the campus a bit. The St. John’s University campus seems very nice, and apparently there’s a sugar shack where they process their own maple syrup. There likely won’t be anything going on now, but it will be interesting to see. I’ve also heard the monks have this bible illumination project going on which would be cool to see.
This is me right now. Still have 2 1/2 days of stuff to cram into my brain.
Annual meeting’s over, and now I’m at the summer school. Lots of interesting sessions at the meeting. Didn’t learn anything groundbreaking, but I did learn a lot of new techniques for doing what I’m already doing, and got reminded about a bunch of stuff I should be doing or need to get around to.
It was a good meeting overall. Spent most of my time at the CT and PET/CT sessions which were all very good and very informative. Caught up with a few old friends too, which is always nice.
The AAPM summer schools are usually pretty interesting. To keep the costs down, they like to re-introduce (or introduce in some cases) attendees to the dorm experience. I think it’s a good thing because it also keeps people close by and provides lots of opportunities for post-session socializing. I’ve enjoyed all the summer schools I’ve been to, and I think this one should be a good one too. This one is a little more remote than past summer school’s I’ve attended, so that will be a little different.
I’ll be glad to get back home though.
Thanks to flight delays, I got back from the meeting about an hour later than scheduled. It seems the more flying I do, the more annoyed at it I get. USAir’s self check-in kiosks never work for me and timing for the flights always seems to leave me with 2 or 3 hour layovers. Maybe it’s just the places I’m going.
Anyway, the meeting was very interesting with a big focus on informatics rather than just PACS and different implementations. There were a few talks about developing radiology ontologies and using them to develop semi-intelligent systems to help with diagnoses. There’s a lot of datamining of radiology reports and journal articles that can be done to help radiologists, which is only just starting to be done at a few places. Sounds like really cool stuff.
A couple of talks about setting up big archive centers that kind of emphasized how far behind the medical field is with respect to technology. Learned about a lot of interesting sounding software that I’m looking forward to trying out at work.
The Rhode Island Convention Center where the meeting was held was a nice facility conveniently located near a bunch of hotels, although could have benefited from better WiFi coverage and more power outlets for us battery-impaired laptop users. There were power bars in the SIIM lounge, but it was too far away from the nearest hotspot to get anything more than a low signal. Maybe I just have a crappy wireless card in my 5150, but it seemed to me that the two WiFi hotspots in the building were pretty localized. If you weren’t in visual range of the hotspot sign, you were pretty much out of luck.
Still practicing my talk for this afternoon. Thanks to much pumping up from my friend Jay who’s been telling everybody at the meeting he sees, I’m feeling much pressure to make this a good one to live up to the hype. It’s making me nervous. The morning sessions got skipped to get in more rehearsal time plus a few last minute tweaks to the talk.
Did take a little bit of time out to scout out the exhibit area. Saw a few neat things with some innovative mouse designs from a company called Contour Design. They’ll be worth checking out in more detail later.
Anyway, back to practicing.