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AAPM 2005 Day 3

On the schedule for this morning:

7:30 (PDT) – PET Physics and Technology II
Lots of good info on the various corrections needed for PET imaging. Acceptance testing/QC topic was interesting too. I have a feeling our PET/CT (whenever we get it) is going to take up a good chunk of my time.

8:30 – Radiation Safety and Risk Management II
Topic was radionuclide therapy and patient release criteria. Thought it would be more general, but the focus was on I-131. Stuff I know already, so I skipped out half way through.

10:00 – Advances in CT Hardware, Algorithms and Applications
Good presentation on recent developments in CT by Dr Kalendar. He’s always a good source for learning what’s on the cutting and bleeding edges of CT. Interesting reconstruction techniques presented by Dr Pan.

12:00 – Lunch and posters
I had thought I’d be spending a few hours studying posters, but after about 30 minutes, I think I went through all the diagnostic related posters. Lots of therapy related posters on 4D CT and tumour tracking though. No Cat 2 CE credits there for me this year.

13:30 – Cone-beam CT
Some interesting talks on CBCT. Most of the equipment used involved FP imagers on therapy units or C-arm type set-ups.

16:00 – Maintenance of Certification Update
Very informative discussion on the ABR’s maintenance of certification efforts. Sounds somewhat onerous at first glance, but the majority of it really just amounts to documenting what most of us do on a daily basis anyway. I don’t think it will be so bad, except for the $1700 fee.

18:00 – AAPM Night out at the Museum of Flight

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AAPM 2005 Day 2

On the schedule for this morning:

7:30 (PDT) – PET Physics and Technology
First topic was basic PET physics and detector technology. Pretty basic stuff. Second topic was reconstruction algorithms, which was interesting and probably deserved it’s own session.

10:00 – President’s Symposium
Very inspirational talk by Dr John Rigden about Einstein’s 1905 papers and what makes them so special and revolutionary.

13:30 – Computed Tomography
Hoo, lots of dry topics that mostly flew over my head.

16:00 – Dual modality imaging
Best session of the day. Learned lots of things to consider and think about for future image fusion work.

18:00 – AAPM awards ceremony and reception
I think I may skip this and go do touristy things down by the Market tonight.
Interesting note: there seem to be more women at this year’s meeting than I remember from past meetings. This is a good thing.

The wireless lounge is a nice area to hang out and get some Net access. The only problem with it is that it’s surrounded by windows and sometimes gets too bright to see a laptop screen very well. Every now and then the connection will drop too, causing page loading errors. Mildly annoying.

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Gert: Lucky 7

While I was out being a tourist yesterday, Gert appeared just off the coast of Mexico just south of where Emily went ashore. More rain for northern Mexico.

Next up: Harvey.

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AAPM 2005 Day 1

According to the pilot, this is supposed to be Mount Rainier. At least that’s what he said it was when we were flying past it. The original picture was a little flat, but thanks to The Gimp and a little histogram thresholding (Color Tools/Level), I managed to make it look a lot better.

A view of Mt Rainier from the plane flying into Seattle, WA
Mt Rainier from the plane flying into Seattle, WA

It’s day 1 of the 2005 AAPM Annual meeting. A few minutes ago there were throngs of people waiting to get into the technical exhibit where the vendors have their booths set up. As soon as they announced it was open, everybody rushed in and things got really quiet. Then everyone came back carrying lunch boxes and it got noisy again.

Anyway, today’s mostly filled up with committee meetings for me. No time to check out vendors today. Plenty of time for that tomorrow and the rest of the week though.

Did get to spend a good chunk of time hanging out with my sister and her family yesterday. Went to the Science Fiction Museum with my brother-in-law while my sister took her girls to the Seattle Children’s Museum. The SF museum was pretty cool. Lots of cool SF related artifacts, costumes, books and such. There were props and costumes from all the major SF TV shows and movies there, but one significant show that seemed to be missing was Space: 1999. I suppose they just don’t have anything from the show, or maybe it rotated out of their collection. Seems like a pretty big omission to me though. Still pretty cool place to go visit.

Ok, time to head off to the next committee meeting.

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Heading to Seattle tomorrow

Tomorrow morning it’s an early morning flight heading out to Seattle for the AAPM Annual Meeting.

Looking forward to the trip, both for the opportunity to get back to Seattle, and the chance to see my sister and family again. After the meeting we’ll be heading across the sound to Vancouver to hang out with my brother and his family, and as an added bonus we’re flying the parents in for the weekend. It will be a mini-family reunion and the first time we’ve all been together since our wedding. Should be a good time.

With any luck I’ll be able to find a place to get online with my laptop and blog my impressions of the meeting and my travels.