University of California

Shortages of trained medical physicists persist across Africa. Needs-assessment surveys were utilized to determine trainee interest and medical physics curricular gaps to aid in design of hands-on outreach workshops for the African School of Physics, a severa...

As healthcare systems place increasing emphasis on environmental sustainability, diagnostic imaging modalities – particularly CT and MRI scanners – represent a significant opportunity for reducing energy consumption. However, the terminology and implementatio...

Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology Physics

Structured education in artificial intelligence (AI) has become increasingly important for medical physicists as AI tools are integrated into clinical practice. To address this need, the AAPM Ad Hoc Advisory Committee on AI Boot Camps (AHAIBC) was established...

Therapy Physics

This study presents a hybrid framework combining Vision Transformer (ViT) and handcrafted radiomic features for oropharyngeal carcinoma (OPC), to enhance multi-endpoint survival prediction.

Accurate patient stratification is critical for personalized radiation therapy in head-and-neck cancer (HNC), yet it remains challenging due to disease heterogeneity, high-dimensional feature spaces, and limited sample sizes for specific clinical endpoints. T...

Real-time dose verification remains a critical unmet need in radiation therapy. We developed physics-informed AI models for radiacoustic imaging (RAI) to enable quantitative, real-time in vivo dose monitoring for proton therapy. Our approach addresses two big...

To evaluate the impact and viability of implementing an automated weekly check tool that tracks daily volume changes of target volumes and organs at risk (OARs) for head and neck treatments, optimizing when to re-scan and re-plan the patient.

To develop a unified machine learning model which can predict the dose distribution for any disease site treated with VMAT. The model uses minimal inputs (CT dataset and structure contours) to rapidly output a clinically acceptable dose distribution deliverab...

To evaluate dosimetric trends and robustness of online adaptive radiation therapy for focal-boosted prostate SBRT. Materials/

To develop and validate the first open-source, CdTe-based photon-counting CT (PCCT) simulation framework using CATsim. The goal was to emulate clinical PCCT performance and quantitatively compare simulated versus experimental iodine and calcium Hounsfield uni...

Accurate delineation of Head and Neck (H&N) Gross Tumor Volumes (GTV) is a prerequisite for effective radiotherapy, represents a significant cognitive challenge, and may contribute to an observed outcomes deficit between high-volume and low-volume H&N radioth...

Preclinical glioblastoma (GBM) models are crucial for the development of novel therapeutic strategies to improve GBM outcomes. Highly conformal conventional fractionation forms the basis for standard-of-care radiotherapy (RT) in human GBM. However, most precl...

MR-guided radiotherapy, especially adaptive therapy, involves complex, multi-stage clinical workflows that are challenging to quantify using conventional manual metrics. In-depth, quantitative, understanding of the clinical workflow can provide crucial insigh...

The Varian Halcyon linear accelerator, featuring a ring-gantry design and dual-layer multileaf collimator (MLC), has gained increasing clinical adoption due to its streamlined workflow and operational efficiency. Unlike conventional C-arm linacs, Halcyon comm...

The nutritional status of head and neck cancer (HNC) patients receiving radiotherapy often declines due to treatment-related side effects. This study characterizes the effect of baseline body mass index (BMI) on overall survival and analyzes how soft tissue v...

For craniospinal irradiation (CSI), VMAT offers superior dose conformality and normal tissue sparing compared to traditional 3D techniques. However, generating these plans is cumbersome. It requires multiple isocenters, optimization of a large number of organ...

MRI provides advantages for tumor and critical structure delineation in head-and-neck (H&N) radiotherapy. However, H&N MR-only workflows remain challenging due to the large field-of-view and susceptibility artifacts arising from the sinuses, dental hardware,...

To survey current clinical practice, assess priorities, and identify resource gaps related to environmental sustainability in medical imaging physics.

Proton therapy is an increasingly adopted cancer treatment due to its high dose conformity enabled by the Bragg peak (BP), reducing radiation exposure to surrounding healthy tissue. However, this steep dose gradient makes treatment accuracy highly sensitive t...

Therapy Physics

Accurate radiotherapy delivery requires precise knowledge of soft-tissue anatomy at the time of treatment, particularly for abdominal targets affected by respiration, peristalsis, and inter-fractional anatomical changes. Current clinical systems provide limit...

Ultrafast ultrasound (UFUS) enables imaging of blood flow, functional dynamics, cardiac motion, and real-time treatment verification. UFUS is often acquired using high frame-rate single plane-wave imaging (SPWI), which has limited image quality due to the sin...

While Proton Acoustic (PA) imaging has shown promise for range verification, its application in complex transcranial environments remains under-explored. This study aims to demonstrate the feasibility of in situ 3D dose mapping and localization of pulsed prot...

Physics plan and chart review is one of the most effective QA processes to identify high-severity errors in radiotherapy treatments; mastering it is crucial for our residents. However, exposure to such errors during training is limited, making it challenging...

While mentorship programs by AAPM and other institutions are increasing, there remains a strong need to raise awareness and provide resources for students and early-career physicists to explore diverse and rewarding career opportunities. This session aims to...

Education

AAPM Task Group 430 aims to comprehensively evaluate organ and effective dose (ED) estimations from whole body CT data to support recommendations for DLP-to-ED conversions factors and their associated uncertainties. Accurate whole-body organ segmentation is c...

In many parts of the world, patients face limited or no access to medical imaging and radiotherapy, which are essential for diagnosing and treating cancer and other diseases. High costs of equipment, dependence on highly specialized staff, and the need for ad...

Professional

Therapy Physics

Reirradiation is an increasingly encountered scenario in radiation oncology as cancer survival improves and patients live long enough to experience local recurrence or second primaries. While offering clinical benefit, these treatments are uniquely complex an...

Conventional Dual-Energy CT (DECT) multi-material decomposition (MMD) often suffers from systematic bias due to linear mixing assumptions that fail to account for nonlinear attenuation effects like beam hardening and scatter. These instabilities are magnified...

Protoacoustic (PA) imaging enables real-time verification of proton dose deposition by reconstructing 3D initial pressure maps from acoustic signals generated during proton delivery. However, in practical treatment settings, detectors cannot fully surround th...

Professional

Radiomic feature reproducibility across CT protocols is limited by sensitivity to acquisition and reconstruction parameters. This work investigates whether standard physical image quality (IQ) metrics can quantitatively predict radiomic feature variation, ena...

Accurate characterization of image quality (IQ) enables cohort stratification and optimization of downstream tasks in imaging and image analysis. A recent multi-institutional study curated CT images of an IQ phantom across diverse scanners and sites, capturin...

This educational session will review modern and emerging techniques for iodinated contrast administration in CT imaging, including injector technology, efficient dosing strategies, and photon counting CT with a focus on reducing the associated impact on patie...

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) progression can be monitored with longitudinal PET imaging. Changes in amyloid and tau; two characteristic AD proteins, are measured using [11C]PiB and [18F]AV1451, similar to how serial imaging with [18F]FDG is used to clinically ass...

Therapy Physics

Upright patient positioning is transitioning rapidly from concept to clinic in both photon and proton therapy, supported by compact treatment systems, innovative immobilization devices, and the development of upright imaging platforms. Early studies highlight...

Therapy Physics

Imaging phantoms are foundational to building reliable, scalable, and equitable imaging systems. This symposium provides an overview of how contemporary phantoms and phantom-based methods connect benchtop measurements to clinical performance. The following th...