Miss Helen Elizabeth Anne Farran (B.Sc) succeeded Miss Dorothy Wellington (described here), the first clinical physicist in Australia, at the Melbourne Hospital. In 1947 Miss Farran was one of the trainers for a one year Radiotherapy course conducted at the Melbourne…
The discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Röntgen in 1895 prompted excitement around the world, including in Australia. The therapeutic application of “Röntgen rays” was explored almost immediately – here are the milestones of those early years in Australia. References Bailey…
In 1977, Dr. Rutherford Kaye Scott presented the first Sir Peter MacCallum Lecture at the opening of the new wing of the Peter MacCallum Hospital in Melbourne, which was published with the title “The Radiant Years” in Australasian Radiology (vol….
Embedded footage from experiment in Masters research project of Anthony Orth, which examined dose uniformity of various total skin electron therapy treatment techniques. Here, a RANDO phantom has been placed on a custom-made rotating platform, controlled by an Arduino system….
The following advertisements were taken from personal scans of Australasian Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine issues published in 1989 and 1990. Gammasonics provided (and continues to provide) equipment for medical physics departments.
In September 2015 I began organising a monthly journal club meeting within the Radiation Oncology Medical Physics group at the Royal Brisbane & Women’s Hospital. Meetings involved a round-table discussion of the papers distributed a couple of weeks in advance. The…
Radiation therapy was once widely used in the treatment of benign diseases. Leer et al (1996) reported that in 1948, at the Rotterdam Radiotherapeutic Institute, 3348 benign disorders were irradiated compared with 857 malignant tumours. Early therapeutic applications of radiation in Australia included the treatment…
Flatbed film scanners are used within radiation oncology medical physics departments for the scanning of radiosensitive film. Depending on the film in use, a physicist will want to extract colour channel data from the scan, which is frequently saved as a…
Radiosensitive film is frequently used by radiation oncology medical physicists for quality assurance measurements. The physicist is sometimes interested in obtaining a calibrated dose value (as opposed to relative values). One calibration method, using calculated optical density (OD) values, involves…
The field size of a radiation beam is generally defined using the 50% isodose line. When examining cross-plane or in-plane dose profiles, this can be referred to as the full width at half maximum (FWHM). The second python exercise, detailed here, was…