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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