Where, and when is the 11th Biennial ESTRO Conference on Physics and Radiation Technology to be held?
London was chosen as the venue for the 11th Biennial ESTRO Conference on Physics and Radiation Technology, to be held between the 8th and 12th of May, 2011.
What will be the main focus of the scientific programme?
This scientific programme will provide an opportunity to present and discuss new achievements in radiotherapy physics and technology whilst also offering a package of high level educational lectures.
In constructing the programme we have tried to involve people from different countries in order to broaden the traditionally active group, thus bringing radiotherapy physics and technology closer to all ESTRO members.
The programme is focused on emerging topics and constitutes a very interesting package of: advanced imaging for radiotherapy, dose painting based on functional imaging, QA of imaging, adaptive strategies for intra-fraction and adaptive strategies for inter-fraction including non-rigid dose summation. As usual, proton therapy is of great interest and we all await the moment when this technology will be sufficiently developed to offer cost-effective tools, allowing the spread of this promising modality. Risk management and practical technologies affecting the daily practice of patient irradiation will also be extensively discussed.
So it will be of interest to clinicians present and interested in both external beam and brachytherapy?
We aim to capture the interest of clinicians by offering presentations with physics and technology which may have an immediate impact on clinical radiotherapy and should therefore be appealing for the clinicians who are present for the GEC ESTRO conference and the 35th Anniversary ESTRO Conference. This opportunity, with many clinicians present and interested in both external beam and brachytherapy, should be of benefit to our conference and we believe our programme offers a great deal which may be of interest to professionals other than physicists and RTTs. This approach fosters the ESTRO aim of bringing together specialists from different disciplines in order to create a successful chain for patient treatment, so important in the overall process of healing.
What do you expect to be the highlights of this meeting?
As usual scientific “hot” topics like organ motion and deformation and molecular imaging will attract the most interest. But, besides these, we want to highlight the need for some degree of unification and accreditation in medical physics and radiation technology, to be equally recognised worldwide, and therefore a special session has been planned presenting European and American points of view on full professional mobility throughout the world.
Special attention has been paid to the young scientists programme and a special track has been prepared to be of interest to our younger colleagues.
How many delegates are you expecting at this conference?
It is always difficult to estimate, but a steady trend observed during previous years has showed an increasing number of participants from one conference to the next. This year might be different, however, because some physics delegates may register for GEC ESTRO while clinicians will register for Biennial Physics, thus making the situation more complex. We will see what emerges in London.
The GEC-ESTRO and International Oncology Forum are to be held nearby - do you expect there to be much interaction between these three conferences?
In practice all delegates can visit all rooms, listen to presentations from the three conferences and participate in the discussions there. We physicists look forward to seeing clinicians at our presentations as it promotes closer collaboration later, in the clinic.
And so who should attend?
Physicists and RTTs are usually the dominant group but, due to the reasons outlined above, we expect to see more clinicians and biologists than in previous physics and technology Biennial Meetings.
Julian Malicki, Chairperson of the conference
Physicist
Great Poland Cancer Centre
Poznan, Poland