Driving a Car is like Creating a Treatment Plan?
I am a radiation therapist and a treatment planner. and the current state of affairs is that I must use a treatment planning system to create an optimized plan. However, this is very much multifaceted in nature, no different than the multiple number of things a driver must be cognizant of while driving. In a treatment planning system, each and every step is only as good as the previous step. This could not be any more important for driving a car, otherwise you may not be heading the direction you originally wanted to! To name the steps in some order:
- Contours or ROIs
- Points of Interest or POIs
- Entering the prescription dose
- Gantry Angles
- Collimator Angles
- Couch Angles
- Energy
- For the sake of simplicity, we will end it here otherwise this can go on and on
Each and every step is fulfilled individually, however much like driving a car, and with each and every step serving its own purpose, the end goal (the treatment plan) is an amalgamation of all these different parameters coming into one. So, if you want to drive a car to your destination successfully, you must understand the importance of each individual step, in order to understand its role in the bigger picture.
As an aside, to aid our students, as an educator we go through these steps one by one to show how they impact the overall plan. What makes this complicated is that in most instances you are not working in a vacuum as it were, and there may be multiple parameters which have to be tweaked to create the best possible treatment plan for our patient. I suppose that is no different then driving a car either i.e. a care vibrating on braking can mean alignment is required, or it could also mean you did not notice the pot hole you hit!
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