Just defended my PhD thesis in medical physics. Worked on radiation therapy treatment planning, which combines optimisation theory with the physics of Monte Carlo particle transport engines (and more macro energy deposition modeling as well) to simulate millions of different radiation dose distributions in patients and figure out which combination will lead to the right outcome based on what the radiation oncologist prescribes.
People in my field are fairly fortunate as there is a career track as a clinical medical physicist that is highly paid and pretty low stress, so most people end up going there. The work consists of maintaining and calibrating the radiation therapy machines, along with implementing new technologies in the clinic, and fixing problems that don't fall within the job description of the radiation therapists. Like what to do when a radioactive seed falls on the floor instead of going inside the patient where it's supposed to go. There's also a separate track as an imaging physicist where you maintain and QA the diagnostic imaging machines.
I'm personally doing a postdoc at the junction between optimisation, machine learning and radiation therapy. Just starting out though. Basically just extending my PhD work to automate the treatment planning process and remove the variability in treatment plan quality due to the level of experience of the people making the plans.
Sounds fascinating. What coordinate systems are used for treatment planning? Given how much bodies can change over time, and the difficulty of re-achieving a specific pose, I'm curious if there are interesting ways to correlate measurements over time. Certainly, medical training involves learning lots of prepositional anatomy words like "antecubital" but is there anything more precise, a GPS system for bodies? This seems very challenging for e.g. the gastrointestinal tract -- but I could imagine something using lots of relative reference points, the way I assume surgeons orient themselves.
It's much more primitive than you think. Dose distributions are simulated based on a CT/MRI that was acquired before treatment (treatment often lasts weeks). Only minor corrections are made when anatomy changes during the course of treatment, even though the patient is often losing tons of weight due to chemo, etc. There are quite a few tools that help with patient positioning, like vac-lok bags or literally molding a mask and drilling it down on the treatment couch (an example is shown here: https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/new-radiothera...).
Motion during treatment can be tracked with cameras or IR sensors or subcutaneous probes but that doesn't tell you about internal organs moving. The topic of deformable registration, where you find a non-rigid mapping between initial imaging conditions and the current ones, is still a topic of active research. Adaptive planning, where you actively change the treatment plan every N sessions based on the most up to date information, is also actively researched / implemented in some good research centers.
For treatment planning you just use a standard Cartesian grid, or a "beam's eye view" coordinate system that's aligned with the radiation beam axis as it rotates around the patient.
Makes sense; thanks. I'm out of my depth but it seems neurosurgery may just have it easier here, being able to fix a rigid stereotaxy head frame and fiducial markers across both imaging and therapy. Not to mention less tissue deformation enabling a gamma knife intersection-of-beams approach (i.e. ~200 collimated, mm-wide gamma sources).
Not to be glib but on behalf of the thousands of people going into a radiotherapy clinic today for treatment, thanks for working to improve these techniques.
Don't quote me on this because I only covered the topic briefly in some applied classes before doing 6 years of research, but if I remember correctly, you grab it with long tweezers and dump it in a shielded "garbage can" type container. And fill tons of paperwork that involves estimating the radiation dose delivered to everyone that could've been exposed. And probably present a post mortem at conferences about how you dealt with it.
I want to echo point #2 about listening rather than talking. When I first pitched my work to radiation therapy vendors at big conferences, I was expecting a kind of adversarial exchange to take place where I'd have to defend my software against cynical people trying to find its flaws, shark-tank style.
Instead I found that vendors were dying to tell me what they need and what's important for them. I quickly realised that the most important part after giving my pitch was to basically ask tons of questions about what they think is important and why. The vendors' answers were invaluable in honing my pitch for other vendors, but also to steer the direction of my project.
This can be dangerous as well though. Most people aren't naturally adversarial and get uncomfortable pushing down paths where you don't know the answer or seem unprepared.
You often won't get someone to really challenge your assumptions unless they have some meaningful motivation. So you may have to listen in a different way than you're used to, or push people a bit to get them really comfortable with telling you things they might think you don't want to hear.
-Working for a big tech company: you're writing code to deliver more ads to more people so the company can grow and deliver even more ads to even more people
-Being a truck driver: you're moving boxes around
-Being a professional hockey player: you and your team are moving really fast with a disk shaped object trying to put it in a net while people try to prevent you from doing it
-Being a stock trader: making money by spending your whole life reading company reports and hoping you're right about whether they're doing well or not
-Being a quant: using your hard earned computer science skills to move money around and turn a profit instead of helping humanity
Almost every human endeavor can be trivialized if you choose to only see one side of it.
You're right in some sense, although I think those other fields are different in that people are honest upfront about what you're doing, and people see the value in the tediousness.
Academics, though, reached some inflection point (not too long ago really) where papers are just published, or grants proposals are written, just so it can be put on a CV. There's a huge discrepancy between the activity and its purpose, and a lot of denial about what's going on.
The denial seems to be decreasing a little, with more and more pieces like this Nature article, but I don't think the general public really understands the nature of the problems involved, nor are scientists really often honest about the nature of scientific work today.
One issue that's missing from this article is the impact of these trends on senior academics: it makes it almost impossible to move from one institution to a next, because of the volumes of young Ph.D. grads that are available. So if you are stuck in a problem institution, or in a poor institution-fit, or your spouse needs a job elsewhere, you're f*d, to put it mildly. This then creates all sorts of problems up the chain, where you have senior people whose careers would improve if they could move, and people staying would be happier, but they can't, or it takes forever. It leads to all kinds of problematic interpersonal problems that would be resolved easily in another field by someone just moving someplace else they'd be happier at. In academics, your career is often tied to a particular institution, because of the glut of qualified graduates, which is totally screwed up.
Academics has become cannabilistic. You're expected to just sort of throw yourself and your family at the altar of "science," the meaning of which is increasingly corrupted and distorted.
Baker/cook: you're making food for people, either to nourish them or give them joy.
Farmer: you're making food for people.
Construction worker: you're making buildings for people to live or work or play in.
I think the problem is that many of our jobs are crappy, not that almost every human endeavor is equivalent to pushing paper around. Nurses, doctors, etc, are doing important work as well. The bad part is when it's 90% paper (common in healthcare in the US).
Find you a tech company that is actually building something physical, not just selling ads.
Curiously none of the jobs you mentioned are well paid (well, I guess it depends on who you mean to include, since owning a farm or being Mario Batali probably isn't bad). But besides that I think we could do the same thing, really. A cynic could say a farmer just grows surplus corn to collect subsidies on ethanol.
Most farmers don't grow ethanol. And ethanol is a fuel, it isn't just paper, regardless of the subsidies.
As far as being well-paid: farmers are fairly well-paid. They have to work hard and use a LOT of what you might call automation (combine harvesters and the like).
But to your point: I sometimes am persuaded by the conjecture that we developed BS paper-pushing jobs for people since we've automated away farming, much of manufacturing, etc. Office Space comes to mind, too.
Well, a lot of people work on a farm who are not by any stretch of the imagination rich, and someone operating a large factory farm is probably not the image that comes to mind when you think "farmer," is what I meant to say.
As for the ethanol, it's a fuel, but without the subsidies and legal mandates would there be a good reason to use it? I'd always heard it's not really efficient and the environmental impact is negligible-to-negative, even though on the surface being renewable is good.
Ethanol mandates really kicked off in the W administration. I think it's worth remembering that at the time, the primary motivation was probably more geopolitical than climate: ethanol is domestically produced, as are many of the energy inputs (such as electricity and natural gas). The US now produces a non-trivial amount of ethanol, enough that if it were removed from the market, we'd probably import significantly more foreign oil.
I guess my point was that the "moral" aspect of academia (="pushing the limits of knowledge") has faded away over the last few decades.
Currently departments are pressing researchers towards output rather than long-term quality work - at least that was the key aspect of my post-doctoral experience.
I wish MUDs were featured more prominently in online gaming history. They basically defined my childhood, and I learned how to code by writing vendor bots on a MUD. Dealing with edge cases (customers trying to buy invisible items without being able to see invisible!) and people trying to scam my bots taught me some valuable programming lessons that stick with me to this day.
Could you elaborate on what does studying medical physics entail? This is the first time I'm hearing about it and I'm curious since this appears to be at the intersection of two unbelievably complex fields (to me at least)
In general, the field is split into imaging research (MRI, CT, Ultrasound, optical imaging) and radiotherapy research. It's a very applied field, the fundamental physics has been figured out a long time ago except for some really niche areas. For example, some people are trying to model particle transport inside DNA itself at the nanometer scale, where the transported particles have very low energies. There's still some physics work to be done there, but it's pretty marginal and the lack of theory in those areas is mostly due to theoretical physicists losing interest rather than the theory being too difficult.
I personally work in radiotherapy, making simplified (faster) Monte Carlo particle transport algorithms for use in treatment planning, and also finding more "modern" optimisation techniques to handle the many degrees of freedom available on radiotherapy linear accelerators to produce higher quality treatment plans compared to what we can do right now. It's hard to define what a high quality treatment plan is without a lot of background, but basically we try to find ways to put more radiation in tumours while sparing the healthy tissue all around the tumour. My "research" is like 95% programming.
I actually just finished a manuscript with overleaf and published it on biorxiv (shameless plug: http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/07/25/065789.1). Unfortunately, latex isn't used that widely in biological sciences. There is a bit of a learning curve that people just aren't willing to invest time in. During preparation of the manuscript, I had to convert latex to word to distribute to collaborators and then manually edit the latex file accordingly afterwards.
Maybe this type of service where it is more microsoft office based will be better when collaborating with non-computational inclined people.
I've had a similar experience. I'm in a hybrid field (medical physics) where half of the people are from pure physics and the other half from a more biomedical engineering background.
It's pretty funny to see the culture clash between the two when it comes to writing articles. We had to learn latex in our first year of undergrad to write lab reports whereas the biomed people really don't see any value in using latex over word (especially for collaborating).
Authorea is for researchers to write and collaborate online. Multiple users can write across formats in the same document (including LaTeX, markdown, rich text) and you can push a button to export to different file formats, journal styles, or publish to the web.
