Av Einar Dale, clinical oncologist.
Oslo universtity hospital, Radiumhospitalet
Einar Dale
The last year or so, I have been thinking about attending ESTRO’s ‘PET course’. The only trouble has been the requirement that an oncologist and a nuclear medicine physician from the same institution should attend the course together. For me, this has seemed as a good idea in theory, but difficult to realize in practice. However, the faculty has now changed the course somewhat. Oncologists, nuclear medicine physicians and others interested in molecular imaging can now attend the course alone. As the course was suddenly announced in a slightly extended version (including functional MRI), I did not hesitate applying. This year, the course was in Madrid, Spain, from 22-25th of February.
We started off with PET and MRI basics, moving on to the use of these imaging modalities in the radiotherapy of different diagnoses. There was an emphasis on functional imaging in relation to dose painting which has been one of the holy grails of radiotherapy since Clifton Ling and co-workers` seminal paper back in 2000 in the Red Journal, paper every doctor working in the field of radiation oncology should have read (Towards multidimensional radiotherapy (MD-CRT): biological imaging and biological conformality. Ling et al., Int J Radiat Oncol Biol Phys. 2000 Jun 1;47(3):551-60).
In the afternoons we did workshops in groups. This gave a good opportunity to discuss the different topics related to one diagnosis in greater detail, studying cases, getting to know each other and simply varying the teaching method when the tiredness sank in, after many hours with traditional lectures. Of course it is very convenient to sit passively on a chair all day, but this is not the evidence based best way of learning, as the faculty obviously is aware of. The following morning one person from each group had to briefly present the headlines from yesterday’s afternoon session. In addition, this gave a good opportunity to practice presentations in English.
All in all it was a very good course, especially valuable for all of us dreaming about dose painting. I would highly recommend this course to colleagues who are interested in radiotherapy.
In general, attending ESTRO courses is absolutely worthwhile. They organize a lot of courses throughout the year, see http://www.estro.org/school. Below is an overview of the courses for the rest of this year that are still open for registration. The courses that are organized outside of Europe, are duplications. These courses are also organized in Europe and if you don’t find it in this overview, look on ESTRO’s web page for the 2016 courses.
