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Adoption of a New Text Book for the Radiation Dosimetry Course of Our Medical Physics Program

J Chang1,2*, (1) Northwell Health, Lake Success, NY, (2) Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY

Presentations

(Sunday, 7/14/2019)  

Room: ePoster Forums

Purpose: The book “Fundamentals of Ionizing Radiation Dosimetry� by Andreo et al published in 2017 is an excellent textbook for the radiation dosimetry course of a graduate medical physics program. However, this book contains too many materials for a one-semester, three-credit course. Here, the author reports his experience in adopting this new textbook for the Radiological Physics and Dosimetry course he taught at Hofstra University.

Methods: After initial review, the author concluded that completely switching the textbook was impractical because (1) Andreo’s book has too many materials, and (2) most materials in the classical textbook by Attix published in 1986 are still appropriate. Therefore, Andreo’s book was used only for those out-of-date chapters in Attix’s. The final curriculum included chapters from both textbooks, with the first half covering Chapters 1-10 of Attix’s book, while the second half Chapters 7, 9-12 and 15-16 of Andreo’s. The order of topics loosely followed the sequence of chapters in Andreo’s book.

Results: This new curriculum was used to teach the radiation dosimetry course at Hofstra University for 2018 fall semester. All chapters were covered except for part of Chapter 15 and all Chapter 16 of Andreo’s book due to insufficient class hours. There were no major problems switching between these two textbooks. Students were sometimes confused by different glossaries between these two books, which was partly mitigated with mapping tables for terminologies/notations.

Conclusion: Androe’s book was successfully adopted for the radiation dosimetry course. The mixed use of both textbooks allowed the instructor to reuse a significant portion of teaching aids developed for Attix’s book, and spend a minimal amount of time developing new ones for Andreo’s. Most new materials adopted from Andreo’s book were related to dosimetry protocols and detection technologies, which have changed significantly in the past three decades.

Keywords

Radiation Dosimetry

Taxonomy

Education: Application

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