Medical Physics

Radiotherapy
The medical physicist has the responsibility to accept, commission and regularly control the performance of radiotherapy equipment: linear accelerators, imaging equipment for treatment simulation (CT, PET-CT, MRI), treatment-planning systems. Together with the dosimetrists, they optimize and calculate the dose of radiation that will be delivered to the contoured structures to make sure that the tumor gets sufficient radiation to destroy it while sparing the normal tissues. Medical physicists have a pivotal role in :

• individualization of the treatments through adaptive radiotherapy
• optimization, validation and implementation of functional imaging
• setting up the MR-LINAC facility
• use of advanced methods for handling big-data to develop and validate predictive models in the actual personalized medicine scenario

Engineering
The role of the engineering team is the provision of the daily engineering service requirements to all three departments. To provide a fast and efficient response in the event of equipment breakdown and to ensure that communication and archiving workflows are operational. Another clinical task is to perform regular quality control checks to assure quality of the x-ray and electron beam output.

Nuclear Medicine
The nuclear medicine physicist provides assistance with the physical aspects of any new applications for nuclear medicine. It is a subfield in medical physics that pertains to:

• the therapeutic and diagnostic applications of radionuclides
• the equipment associated with their production, use, measurement and evaluation
• the quality of images resulting from their production and use

Radiology
Medical physicists in radiology have a leading role in the strategic planning, testing, safe use, and optimization of advances in medical imaging technologies and techniques.

The Department of Medical Physics is recognised for the clinical training of Medical Physics Experts by the FANC in radiotherapy and nuclear medicine. The department welcomes 2 to 3 physicists or engineers yearly to perform their 12 months internship to get their national accreditation.

The department is hosting other internships and master’s thesis students in collaboration with the Nuclear Metrology department and the LISA in ULB, as well as from ISIB, ESI, or IEPSCF.