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the role of a radiology physicist is to
provide support to medical imaging
departments within hospitals to make
sure really in a nutshell that patient
images are required at the best image
quality and the lowest possible
radiation dose and there's a number of
tasks that we do to enable that goal to
be met a medical physicist is a
scientific support person for diagnostic
imaging an interface between technology and
physicians an interface between
technology safety and everybody else it
enters the hospital environment on a day
to day basis I always check for example
in nuclear medicine the quality
assurance of every camera that we use so
it's daily floods and all that sort of
business to make sure that our cameras
are optimized for the best image quality
that we can provide for the diagnosis of
every patient that comes in to our
department optimized images means less
radiation dose faster throughput for
patients less waiting times at least
from our technical aspect if we can get
patients through at a timely manner we
can help the whole service improve
there's no such thing as a typical day
because we do a wide variety of tasks
but some of them would include quality
control of x-ray equipment monitoring of
staff doses monitoring or calculation of
patient radiation doses we do radiation
shielding calculations to make sure
there's lead in the walls and people
working in adjacent areas to say and we
do a lot of teaching to anybody working
with radiation
in the hospital and that extends beyond
the x-ray department operating theatres
and cardiac cath labs for example the
mere process of quality assurance and
quality control at a high level is
adding value all the time by providing
optimal image quality so that enables
our physicians to provide the best
diagnosis that they can at the lowest
radiation dose to the patients it
ensures that the service can provide a
wide range of clinical tests the main
way to describe this is as risk
mitigation so we're minimizing the risk
of miss calling a diagnosis because of
the assurance we're providing on data
quality we're minimizing unplanned
equipment outages through our quality
assurance programs and we're ensuring
regulatory compliance through the work
that we do for radiation safety
for nuclear medicine I see the pet MR
systems being the most exciting
development in the near future we've
already seen pet and CT work very well
together so pet MR should be another
leap forward in providing high quality
images for our physicians some of the
exciting things are certainly the new
technologies that are coming into the
radiology department particular new CT
scanners and new multi modality imaging
where they can combine different types
of imaging like fluoroscopy and CT on
the horizon for nuclear medicine there's
new instrumentation like the whole body
pet Explorer system this is massively
more sensitive than existing pet cameras
and is going to enable us to do tests or
duplicant protocols that we can't
contemplate now low-dose long-time point
that kind of thing this is the era of
personalized medicine and we are trying
to tailor all of our diagnostics and our
treatments to be the most appropriate
ones for that particular patient at this
particular point in time so it's
important from a safety point of view
but it's also important that we try and
maximize the treatment efficacy that we
can achieve
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