1st Edition
Clinical Radiotherapy Physics with MATLAB A Problem-Solving Approach
The first MATLAB® programming book written specifically for clinical radiotherapy medical physicists and medical physics trainees, this much-needed book teaches users how to create their own clinical applications using MATLAB®, as a complement to commercial software particularly when the latter does not cover specific local clinical needs.
Chapters explore key radiotherapy areas such as handling volumes, 3D dose calculation, comparing dose distributions, reconstructing treatment plans and their summations, and automated tests for machine quality assurance. Readers will learn to independently analyse and process images, doses, structures, and other radiotherapy clinical data to deal with standard and non-standard situations in radiotherapy. This book will also significantly improve understanding of areas such as data nature, information content, DICOM RT standard, and data flow. It will be an invaluable reference for students of medical physics, in addition to clinical radiotherapy physicists and researchers working in radiotherapy.
Features:
- Includes real clinical medical physics applications derived from actual clinical problems
- Provides commented MATLAB® scripts working with sample data and/or own data matching input requirements
- Promotes critical thinking and practical problem solving skills
1. MATLAB essentials and principles of simple programming. 2. Radiotherapy physics related data types & basic operations. 3. Reconstructing basic DICOM RT data 4. Modifying DICOM data in radiotherapy. 5. Simple 3D plan sum using rigid registration. 6. Handling regions and volumes of interest in radiotherapy. 7. Three-dimensional dose calculation in radiotherapy. 8. Semi-automated measurement of linac major mechanical parameters. 9. Comparing dose distributions: the gamma method. 10. Example of accessory modeling in radiotherapy
Biography
Pavel Dvorak is a medical physicist with several years’ experience in managerial clinical positions. Within medical physics, he has worked in education, research, and clinical practice in public and private health institutions in the Czech Republic, Austria, and the United Kingdom. His speciality is implementing novel techniques and technologies, creating and managing efficient workflows, and problem solving in radiotherapy.
"This is a well-structured book! Nothing else to expect from an excellent author on the subject of programming. Pavel Dvorak Ph.D.is a Czech medical physicist who had worked at various places in Austria and the United Kingdom and who summarizes in this book his enormous amount of knowledge to work with MatLab® scripts related to clinical radiotherapy physics that he collected for more than 10 years. The additional web-based resources to the book add up to >900MB as ZIP-file including DICOM sample data files.
In the book are MatLab® scripts presented in great detail, that are useful for medical physicists in radiotherapy with ambitions to dig into and/or handle the data themselves for research or quality assurance purpose (clinical use is declined for liability reasons) as well as for students with interests in getting to know clinical radiotherapy physics from the computational side of it.
The book starts with lists of "acronyms and abbreviations" and "definition of terms" that each are briefly explained, so a newcomer to this field is not lost by the use of special acronyms or terms later in the text. The subsequent text is divided into 10 chapters, starting with a chapter on the basics of MatLab®…Each chapter starts with a list of the intended learning outcomes that will be covered in the following. The literature referenced (not much, but better than nothing!) is also listed at the end of each chapter. This way the chapters could be possibly used as stand-alone modules, e.g.as an instructional text for an inverted-classroom teaching concept of a course….This is a well-structured compendium of in great detail explained useful scripts to be used in the commercial MatLab® scripting environment."
—Prof. Dr. Markus Buchgeister, Beuth Hochschule für Technik Berlin, in The European Federation of Organizations for Medical Physics Bulletin (Spring 2019)
"This book provides a "dummy" for beginner’s guide to using MATLAB® to solve common problems in DICOM and imaging post-processing. It also provides guidance on how to manage the preliminary problems of dose calculation and the extrapolation of data from instruments and devices available in modern radiation therapy…The book is intended as an introductory guide to managing simple problems and code in MATLAB® which will be useful in radiation therapy environments. The added value in the book comes from having so many recent references and publications in the field, which will contribute to the training and learning of students and stimulate them to try to improve the state of the art of technology, solving everyday problems even in the absence of software and dedicated technologies, but by developing, if anything, that which is not available in their own radiotherapy department...The book is organized into ten chapters, as the author guides the readers through the problems in DICOM and the typical domain of the TPS, LINAC and images systems available in modern radiation therapy; he tries to provide the reader with the initial tools to understand which parameters, script, or complex codes should be written and how to integrate industrial data with simple interfaces developed in MATLAB®…A much needed addition to current literature in the field, this book is tailored to the needs of medical physicists who are problem-solving using scripts and codes in MATLAB. Dr. Dvorak has provided scripts as dummy codes and summarized a sample of problems typically present in radiotherapy related to the use of advanced systems for treatment plans…The book can be used to support MSc programs in medical physics or early-career professionals from different disciplines (physics, engineering, software and medical instruments design, etc.…) who need to understand the approach of using MATLAB® codes for problem solving in radiation therapy."
—Gabriele Guidi, Ph.D., M.Sc, Director of Medical Physics, Az. Ospedaliero-Universitaria di Modena, Italy in The Medical Physics International Journal (MPI), 2018, Vol.6, No. 2"This introductory programming book demonstrates a series of accessible programming solutions for automating common tasks of the clinical therapy medical physicist. Prior familiarity with brute force solutions to analysis and Quality Assurance allows the reader to appreciate the algorithmic approach of this text. The approach of focusing on the problem/task and algorithmic solution makes the book readable. The reader’s introduction to coding is supplemented with online examples and the MATLAB online help.. The purpose of this book is to show how many common clinical physics tasks can be tackled through using the MATLAB code. Often, medical physicists have a unique set of circumstances, equipment, or software requiring unique solutions. Rather than applying brute force techniques, this book helps lead the reader to eloquent algorithmic solutions that are easily customizable.
This book is written for clinical radiotherapy physicists, educators, students, and medical physics residents…The targeted audience for this book is the population having a general knowledge of radiation therapy tasks, with access to MATLAB, and having time to learn how to program in MATLAB…The accompanying online resources are a series of short MATLAB scripts that are well-commented. These scripts give the reader the correct syntax of the MATLAB code that can be run "as is" or altered…This book is well written with thoughtful practical examples of how to use the MATLAB code to solve many clinical problems that need to be customized. If you have the MATLAB software, I recommend this book."
—Kenneth Bernstein in Med. Phys. 47 (3), March 2020
