This wasn’t the first time that we noticed it either, it just happened to register in our minds today. Anyone else noticed this as well?

This week, we were supposed to construct a plan that would treat a little girl’s brain tumor. The critical structures included the temporal lobes, pituitary gland, spinal cord, optic nerves and the eyes. Our team got together on Thursday and we put together a reasonable plan. Unfortunately, we couldn’t cover the tumor with the prescription dose of 95%. On Friday, I came in and worked on it a bit more and was able to conform the dose to the tumor. However, the tumor was getting 91% of the dose. I was able to bring down the pituitary and temporal lobe doses significantly.

Today, Neil, Yu and I got together and we finished the plan. We pushed the dose to 97% - something other teams couldn’t get. I think it is attributed to the fact that our beams were at strange, but useful locations.

Look through the images to see the tumor volume and our final beam arrangement.

We tweaked some of the beams a little bit, because there was a rising trend over the last few weeks (also noted by the therapists). After this, Alex finished checking his charts and I did a couch isocentricity test and verified the isocenter of the machine by using the front pointer and a pen. We both finished the day by resetting the lasers to an appropriate value using a piece of paper and a polystyrene block.

We then have to rescale the plan so that only one fraction of the treatment is delivered. This number should also match the total amount of monitor units that are delivered to the patient. Furthermore, the total dose delivered (and for each field) should match the patient’s plan.

As for the project, it is coming along a little faster now, since the other events of the summer have died down. I have the interface mostly working and plan to finish it and clean it up by the middle to end of next week. I’d like to get started on the 3d aspect soon, as I know that will take more time. I haven’t dabbled in any sort of 3d before, be it programming or graphics, and being chock-full of lovely vectors, I should probably allocate more time to spend with the mathematics. Hopefully I can get a lot more done this weekend, but with the move - who knows.

Anyways, I haven’t had much time to write on this, but last week I was able to get a lot more done on the project. It does drawing now and I am able to list some vectors and clear them. All I have to do now is clean up the interface and start looking into some VTK code. Unfortunately, that will all have to wait until after exams and that bloody paper is over. *sigh* - only a few more weeks to go. I hope I can handle it.

I can’t really wait for school to start back up, as it is starting to get a bit monotonous doing the same thing every day (well almost). I can see why I might get tired of this career after a while. Med school is starting to look promising again…

I went to the Sprint Store after work to get my phone diagnosed, but after looking for the damn place for 30 mins, they told me that their machine was down. Oh well, I don’t really care if my phone doesn’t work - it’s highly overrated.

Edit: I forgot to mention that we were supposed to do this yesterday, but things as usual are crazy at work, so we just moved it today.

Mark came back a little later and helped me to check the calculations. We then looked at the post plan of that prostate implant from last week and checked the final dosage that was delivered. Apparently it was less than expected, but Mark said the patient could be treated with an external beam to treat the cold spots we found.

Finally, he told me that tomorrow we get to do a commission and calibration of the new BrainLAB system. So I get to look forward to a long night of fun but interesting work.