Imablog

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.

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.

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.