Introduction (2) - The Physicians Role

The most surprising fact to visitors to our Institute is that in our department the physicians, not the physicists, do the planning. The three physicists only give support when it is needed, and check the final plans. We perform an independent Monitor Unit calculation based on independent data sets, but without inhomogenity correction (except for the lung). Agreement with Cadplan calculation is usually within 4%.

Planing by physicians has the following advantages:

  • The planning process is more effective: instead of producing three alternative plans (without the same biological and anatomical knowledge as the physician) and showing them to the physician (who still won't be satisfied), the doctor can experiment by himself optimizing the plan with much more background knowledge than the physicist in a much shorter period of time. Our primary physicians have both degrees in radiology and in radiooncology.
  • Workload is distributed over more persons (normally there are more physicians in a department than physicists).
  • This leads to a greater personal satisfaction among the doctors since they have more control over what happens to 'their' patients.
  • Quality of the plans increases, since each final plan is checked by one of the three physicists. The probability to find a possible error is higher when one checks someone elses work than ones own. This of course requires that the physicians master the planning program.
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    This brings us to the requirements:

  • a planning system that is easy to use
  • physicians who are not afraid of computers
  • physicians who are willing to do the planning (!)
  • physicians who accept to do training on the planning system
  • a clever physics department
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