Spine cord draft

[jtowson@nucmed.rpa.cs.nsw.gov.au (Jocelyn Towson)]

Mike - sorry to be a bit slow* in replying.  We are taking it in turns to
peruse your draft.  At the moment George Bautovich has taken it with him as
holiday reading but we should hear back shortly.

We are all delighted you and your wife would like to visit Australia this
year - what time frame did you have in mind?  There are two relevant
national meetings.
The annual meeting of the Aust. New Zealand Society of Nuclear Medicine is
5-7 May in Auckland (NZ unfortunately, but on the way to Oz from LA).
Abstracts close 31 Jan.  Keynote speakers are Keith Britton, Ignac Fogelman
from UK and Alan Maurer from US.
The annual meeting of the Australian/New Zealand Radiation Protection
Society will be held jointly with medical physicists and bioengineers in
Adelaide 8-11 September, abstracts close April sometime.  Keynote speakers
include Alistair McKinlay from the NRPB in England but are beyond my ken.
I do see from the preliminary notice that a workshop on EGS4 methods is
planned.  I would gladly ask the conference organisers if they would like
to recruit your talents as invited speaker or whatever.
At the local level, I am sure we could arrange a branch meeting of Nucmed
and/or radiation protection folks in Sydney and invite you as guest
speaker, realising that we don't have a budget beyond taking the speaker
out for a meal afterwards!

I mentioned before about another patient-specific dosimetry problem that
cropped up last year.  We instilled some Y-90 colloid into a malignant
intracranial cyst, guesstimating the required activity to give a prescribed
dose to the cyst wall. I won't go into the details just now.  Assuming the
cyst contents and surrounding brain have unit density and we can correct
for curvature, is there somewhere I could look up the dose distribution
with depth (a) if there was uniform distribution of Y-90 in the contents,
(b) if some of the activity plated out on the cyst wall? Or would this call
for another Monte Carlo approach?  I'd be curious to overlay a dose profile
on the histopathology report.
(I am always a little embarrassed in front of radiotherapy physicists who
chase less than 5% error in dose delivery.  At least nucmed therapy
dosimetry is starting to get respectable).

Jocelyn

* and long winded.