(Sunday, 4/8/2018) 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Room: Marquis Ballroom 5-8
IT Basics and Trouble Shooting for Clinical Medical Physicist
Wenzheng Feng
Radiation oncology (RO) is an informatics based discipline; actually RO is one of the most IT-demanding areas of the hospital. Since medical physicists have the best understanding of the overall clinical process, medical physicists should have ability to perform many RO specific IT tasks.
In this symposium we will review IT knowledge essential to medical physics and illustrate sample solution to some typical clinical problems. This session will cover the concepts involved in networking, data transfer, DICOM, DICOM-RT and HL7 connectivity, database operations and Scripting for IT.
There are many hardware, software, and networking issues in RO. The initial response to IT-related problems during treatment must be of high priority and prompt within minutes. Optimally, the first-line response comes from medical physicists, after triage the issue, solve it by their self or contact appropriate personnel, like IT staff, engineer, vendor. Networking inter-connects all the radiation oncology devices together, efficient and reliable data transferring is critical to clinical operations. Network infrastructure will be explained with clinical examples; real-world scenario will be presented to illustrate the typical trouble shooting steps, typical trouble shooting software/tool will be introduced as well.
Current Standards for Information Exchange in Radiation Oncology: DICOM, DICOM-RT, and HL7
Bruce Curran
Prior to the early 1990’s each vendor developed a unique protocol for exchanging information; the result was a chaotic array of software interfaces and translation programs for acquisition of imaging information in radiation oncology. DICOM (Digital Imaging for Communication in Medicine) was developed to provide a standards-based protocol for image data exchange. This standard has been extended to include radiation therapy planning, dose, and verification data and now workflow. We will discuss the basic structure of DICOM, its mechanisms for finding compatible transfer syntaxes and mutual capabilities for communication, and what the medical physicist needs to know to setup and maintain DICOM interfaces in radiation oncology.
Database Basics including applications in Radiotherapy for Safety and Efficiency
Peter A. Balter
Databases are the foundation of many of our clinical systems and the ability to understand them is vital to practice in a radiotherapy clinic. We will discuss database fundamentals and then show how several commercial products uses databases. We will discuss the design and creation of research and task specific databases as well. We will have real world examples of data extraction from commercial databases for clinical support and research using both databases tools, such as the SQL management studio, and programing examples. We will also discuss backup strategies and auditing for enterprise level databases.
“If only my planning system could….� Using scripting to push the envelope on clinical capabilities of treatment planning systems.
Chuck Mayo
The landscape of essential skills and roles for medical physicists is shifting. In this new frontier, ability to code in production level languages to take advantage of application programming interfaces (APIs) built into treatment planning systems (TPS) is increasingly valuable. With these APIs end users are enabled to fill many gaps between intrinsic functionality of the vended system and a wide range of clinic specific needs such as reporting, automated planning, bio-correction, plan evaluation, etc. We will discuss development environments and API capabilities for a few TPSs, review some core coding concepts used in these approaches and provide examples of end user scripts.
Learning Objectives:
1. Refresh the basics of computer networking and gain familiarity of typical trouble shooting tools
2. Understand the fundamentals of connectivity with DICOM, DICOM-RT and HL-7
3. Become familiar with database concepts to improve troubleshooting skills
4. Practice scripting programming with vendor support
Handouts
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