Welcome to the course homepage of the Niels Bohr Summer School on therapeutic and diagnostic medical physics.
The course duration is five days (Monday through Friday) with the two first days focusing on radiation therapy (dosimetry and radiobiology) while the three remaining days focus on the concepts and principles behind medical imaging modalities (CT, MR, PET). The program for each day follows five sessions according to the format outlined below along with a more detailed content. Friday is expected not to have the "exercises 1" block and finish around 15:00.
Session 1.1: Title: Radiation dosimetry. Content: Interactions and cross sections, Absorbed dose, Kerma, exposure, charged particle equilibrium.
Session 1.2: Title: Dose measurements. Content: Ionization chamber and solid state detectors, Depth dose curves, beam qualifiers.
Session 2.1: Title: Basic radiobiology. Content: Radiation interaction with living tissue, cell survival curves, early/late effects, 5 Rs, RBE/OER.
Session 2.2: Title: Fractionation and iso-effects. Content: Dose-response, volume effect and dose-volume-histogram, Linear-quadratic model, EQD2, time-dose-fractionation.
Session 3.1: Title: CT basics and geometry. Content: Short introduction to the clinical use of imaging modalities. Description on CT scanner geometry including fan/cone angle, slice thicknees, intensity and noise considerations and attenuation.
Session 3.2: Title: CT reconstruction. Content: The physics behind CT image contrast, sinograms, forward and simple backward projection, filtered backprojection.
Session 4.1: Title: MR basics and tissue contrast. Content: Nuclear magnetic resonance, spin and precession, magnetic field interaction, T1 and T2 weighted tissue relaxation, Bloch equation.
Session 4.2: Title: MR pulse sequences and imaging. Content: Spin echo pulse sequence, constrast weighting, inversion recovery, gradient-phase-frequency encoding, k- and image space transformation.
Session 5.1: Title: Fundamentals of nuclear imaging. Content: Radionuclide production and detection, cyclotron, nuclear decay, pulse mode, deadtime, efficiency.
Session 5.2: Title: Methods of Nuclear imaging. Content: Scintillators, gamma camera, SPECT, PET, time-of-flight, SUV.