3rd ESTRO Physics Workshop: Science in Development - Introduction - PDF Version

Budapest, Hungary, 26-27 October 2019

The third edition of the ‘European SocieTy for Radiotherapy and Oncology Physics Workshop: Science in Development’ considered five topics that had been selected by the ESTRO Physics Committee from suggestions collected through an open call to our membership. The topic leaders were those who had proposed the selected topics. For this edition of the workshop the topics were:

• computational methods for clinical target volume definition;
• multi-source data fusion for decision support systems in radiation oncology: opportunities, methodologies, standardizations and clinical translation;   
• implementation/commissioning/ quality assurance (QA) of artificial intelligence techniques; 
• clinical applications and quality assurance of surface-guided radiation therapy [in collaboration with the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM)​]; and
• plan quality assessment: dose distribution and robustness metrics.  
   

There were 20 to 40 participants registered in each group, a total of 130. After a provocative opening lecture by Robert Jeraj, associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US, entitled “Medical physicists got stuck in a box: how to get out”, the participants were in the perfect frames of mind to start one-and-a-half days of brainstorming on their selected topics.

The workshop’s open-ended format facilitated the sharing of ideas between participants. It was amazing to see how after intense brainstorming discussions, all the groups on the final day came up with tangible proposals for collaborative projects to follow up on their two days’ work. It was nice to see that some of the participants had already been present at the first two workshops.

This is the last workshop I intend to chair and I am happy to see that what started as a concept three years ago has matured and become a solid project with potential to become a must-go meeting in medical physicists’ calendars.

Participants at the workshop

Nuria Jornet
Chair, 3rd ESTRO Physics Workshop: Science in Development
Medical physicist
Department of Medical Physics and Radiation Protection
Sant Pau Hospital
Barcelona, Spain