March 24, 2015 — Ion Beam Applications S.A. (IBA) announced the successful expansion of IBA Academy on the Road “Small Field Dosimetry Workshop,” organized and hosted with Lung Center of the Philippines in Manila, and the Philippine Organization of Medical Physicists (POMP) on March 7. More than 25 attendees received in-depth lectures and hands-on training on how to save valuable time and increase accuracy and workflow efficiency when collecting beam data for input into a stereotactic treatment planning system.
“The IBA Dosimetry workshop provided us an excellent opportunity to gain good insight about small field commissioning and annual QA [quality assurance]. This is very beneficial to our physicist’s work in Asia,” said Dan Manlapaz, chief physicist, Lung Center of the Philippines, and vice president of the Philippine Organization of Medical Physicists.
“I find the course very timely to create awareness in the Philippine radiation oncology medical physicists, considering that a number of centers are now using specialized procedures that use small fields,” said Nieva O. Lingaton, health physicist III/head, SSDL, Center for Device Regulation, Radiation Health and Research, Department of Health. “The workshop also introduced the new technology of myQA that can help ease the life and improve the efficiency of medical physicists. We have experienced it several times during onsite audits that beam data and profile folders of certain fields we wanted to verify are missing.”
The class was divided into three smaller groups to allow for more individual “hands-on” training in: selection and set up of diodes and chambers for stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) and stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) data collection; organizing collection of data and handling of data files; and collecting small field and larger field X-ray data. Also demonstrated was how physicists will be able to simplify and maximize workflow efficiencies using the myQA global QA platform, which was launched at the 2014 American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) annual meeting.
IBA Dosimetry’s Academy on the Road evolved from the German-based International Competence Center (ICC). With customer advocacy at the core of their CAREprogram, IBA has invested in a full clinical lab available to end-users for hands-on training. “We understand that not everyone can make the journey to our dosimetry headquarters in Schwarzenbruck to experience the ICC, so we decided we could take the ICC to our end user.” said Lutz Mueller, M.D., head of the ICC.
The next Academy on the Road training course, “Advanced Accelerator Beam Data Commissioning,” will be held at The John Theurer Cancer Center, Hackensack University Medical Center in May 2015.
For more information: www.iba-worldwide.com
April 18, 2024 
