This week Ben Hug and other PhD students from the Medical Physics Research Group will be presenting at the 2013 Engineering and Physical Sciences in Medicine (EPSM) Conference here in Perth. The EPSM conference is held annually somewhere in Australia or New Zealand and brings both clinical and research physicists and engineers together to meet and discuss all aspects related to Physics and Engineering in the Medical Field.
The work that Ben will be presenting is based on computational modelling of a specialised detector. This detector collects radiotherapy treatment beam data — used for the modern treatment planning systems that individually plan every patient’s treatment. Ben’s work is in collaboration with researchers from Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney, and is based on small field radiotherapy treatments such as Stereotactic Radiotherapy. The aim of this work is to develop a detector that is better suited to these small field applications. This requires an understanding of the physics behind these small field measurements and how the error associated with such measurements can be minimised. If these errors are minimised there is the potential to reduce the overall error associated with radiotherapy treatment deliveries and therefore improve the patient treatment quality.
