A Special Issue or Section of the journal Medical Physics will be published comprising contributions from the symposium

2003 AAPM Annual Meeting Home

• The symposium will showcase the increasing application in medicine of imaging modalities that use non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation.
  
  
• Instrumentation and the physical principles of the novel modalities will be introduced by invited speakers at a level suitable for the imaging physicist with no previous experience of the modality.
  
  
• The other talks and posters at the symposium will cover more general topics related to the new modalities, including image analysis, quality assurance, safety and comparative evaluations. Specialist knowledge of the imaging modality concerned will not be assumed.

Symposium on Medical Image Analysis: Modalities Using Non-ionizing Electromagnetic Radiation

This symposium will showcase the increasing application in medicine of imaging modalities that use non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation. Examples include modalities using optical, infrared, terahertz and microwave radiation. Methods utilizing both diffuse and coherent radiation, in transmission, reflection or re-emission are relevant. These modalities are of interest to medical physicists and related professionals, but may not be included in a typical Radiology department. They are being introduced for a number of reasons: technical and computing advances, reduced costs of sensors, new applications outside the traditional radiological field, the rise of molecular imaging and the opportunity to use multimodality methods to combine the strengths of several techniques. The symposium will be built around invited, educational presentations that address the physical principles and instrumentation of the key modalities, safety issues and standards such as DICOM. Abstracts are sought on medical image analysis and understanding techniques applied to relevant modalities, quality assurance, safety and comparative evaluations. Examples of categories covered by the symposium are given below, but the list is not exhaustive and all relevant submissions will be considered. However, please note that although the radiation used for ultrasound and MRI is non-ionizing, these modalities are well served by other conferences and elsewhere at the AAPM Annual Meeting, so abstracts primarily on these modalities will not be considered for the symposium.