Conference Attendance
Conference Attendance as a Vendor
In my years with MIM Software, I worked with my colleagues to represent the company in the Vendor Hall of 26 conferences. The product lines I covered spanned the Diagnostic Imaging, Healthcare IT, and Radiation Oncology markets, with an emphasis on PET/CT imaging analysis and registration technologies. As such, the conferences I attended also spanned all three realms of the medical imaging market.
The experience of being at a conference as a vendor is quite different from the experience of being an attendee when it comes to meeting other people. While attendees wander the vendor hall and meet dozens of representatives of different companies, the vendors stay in their booths and speak with dozens and dozens of attendees who filter through over the course of several days. Some attendees wander through and have no prior exposure to the company or products. Some are seeking specific information or demonstrations as part of a purchase process. Some are existing customers who want to see what's new or ask support questions. Some are old friends stopping by to say hello. Working alongside people like MIM's President, Dr. Dennis Nelson, I was able to meet many of the movers and shakers of the diagnostic and therapeutic world.
My main regret about being at all of these conferences is that I was tethered to the booth almost the entire time, so it was rare that I could attend any the presentation sessions.
The experience of being at a conference as a vendor is quite different from the experience of being an attendee when it comes to meeting other people. While attendees wander the vendor hall and meet dozens of representatives of different companies, the vendors stay in their booths and speak with dozens and dozens of attendees who filter through over the course of several days. Some attendees wander through and have no prior exposure to the company or products. Some are seeking specific information or demonstrations as part of a purchase process. Some are existing customers who want to see what's new or ask support questions. Some are old friends stopping by to say hello. Working alongside people like MIM's President, Dr. Dennis Nelson, I was able to meet many of the movers and shakers of the diagnostic and therapeutic world.
My main regret about being at all of these conferences is that I was tethered to the booth almost the entire time, so it was rare that I could attend any the presentation sessions.
Conference Attendance as a Regular Attendee
AAMD 39th Annual Meeting - June 2014, Seattle, WA
This was my first conference as an attendee rather than a vendor. I attended three special sessions:
ASTRO 56th Annual Meeting - September 2014, San Francisco, CA
This was my first ASTRO as an attendee. The experience as a dosimetrist is quite different from AAMD, which should probably not be surprising. The conference is tuned towards the interests of physicians and physicists. Instead of attending presentation sessions, I spent quite a lot of time in the exhibit hall talking to companies I already know and to companies I've never heard of. When I used to work for MIM, there seemed to be an unspoken agreement that vendors stayed out of each other's booths. Being a regular attendee opened up doors that had always been closed to me even in the exhibit hall, which had always been my home at these shows. Wandering around with a student badge let me finally see the scope of what is available in the market firsthand.
Besides exploring vendors in areas where I am already at home, I tried to get a quick and dirty education on the tools available in the world of brachytherapy, since my exposure so far has mostly been focused on external beam treatments, and I will need to develop a clinical competency in brachytherapy by the time I graduate.
I was also seriously impressed at the size and scope of the poster hall. I might not have set foot in the hall if not for the fact that I had the honor of being a co-author for a poster on display that year. Now that I've seen what's there, I will be certain to check it out in future years.
I did not log nearly as many continuing education hours at ASTRO because of all my time in the exhibit hall, plus the time I needed to spend working on homework for the program.
AAMD 40th Annual Meeting - June 2015, Orlando FL
This was quite a different experience for me than the 2014 conference, because I was a speaker and a volunteer as well as an attendee. In late 2014, I submitted an abstract for a presentation at the 2015 conference, and my abstract was accepted. I developed a 50 minute presentation called Let the Computer do the Busy Work: Save Contouring Time with Scripting. I also volunteered to help run the 2nd annual Interactive Contouring Workshop, which you can read about on the Service page.
This was my first conference as an attendee rather than a vendor. I attended three special sessions:
- Interactive Contouring Workshop. At this workshop, I got my first hands-on experience with Varian Eclipse. We learned how to draw several important organ at risk structures as well as the most common mistakes and red herrings to watch out for. The structures we drew in the workshop were the left and right parotid glands, the left and right submandibular glands, and the glottic larynx.
- Eclipse Treatment Planning System New Users Training. This 3 hour class was my first exposure to planning tools in Eclipse. We skipped right past contouring and went straight to the tools for 3D, IMRT, and VMAT planning. It was a useful orientation to the software, but now that I am using Eclipse daily during my clinical internship, I see that we just barely scratched the surface of what the software does.
- Pinnacle Treatment Planning System New Users Training. This class was much more thorough than the Eclipse training, but in a bad way. We went through every single button in the interface and never got to the point where we did any planning. I am going to try to get onto the waiting list for the 2015 New Users Training session to see if they have revamped the teaching style based on last year's feedback.
ASTRO 56th Annual Meeting - September 2014, San Francisco, CA
This was my first ASTRO as an attendee. The experience as a dosimetrist is quite different from AAMD, which should probably not be surprising. The conference is tuned towards the interests of physicians and physicists. Instead of attending presentation sessions, I spent quite a lot of time in the exhibit hall talking to companies I already know and to companies I've never heard of. When I used to work for MIM, there seemed to be an unspoken agreement that vendors stayed out of each other's booths. Being a regular attendee opened up doors that had always been closed to me even in the exhibit hall, which had always been my home at these shows. Wandering around with a student badge let me finally see the scope of what is available in the market firsthand.
Besides exploring vendors in areas where I am already at home, I tried to get a quick and dirty education on the tools available in the world of brachytherapy, since my exposure so far has mostly been focused on external beam treatments, and I will need to develop a clinical competency in brachytherapy by the time I graduate.
I was also seriously impressed at the size and scope of the poster hall. I might not have set foot in the hall if not for the fact that I had the honor of being a co-author for a poster on display that year. Now that I've seen what's there, I will be certain to check it out in future years.
I did not log nearly as many continuing education hours at ASTRO because of all my time in the exhibit hall, plus the time I needed to spend working on homework for the program.
AAMD 40th Annual Meeting - June 2015, Orlando FL
This was quite a different experience for me than the 2014 conference, because I was a speaker and a volunteer as well as an attendee. In late 2014, I submitted an abstract for a presentation at the 2015 conference, and my abstract was accepted. I developed a 50 minute presentation called Let the Computer do the Busy Work: Save Contouring Time with Scripting. I also volunteered to help run the 2nd annual Interactive Contouring Workshop, which you can read about on the Service page.
Local Weekly Conferences
When I was in Seattle at SCCA Proton Therapy prior to starting my internship, I attended several weekly conferences, including twice weekly consult reviews and weekly plan reviews.
Consult reviews were meetings that included physicians, physicists, dosimetrists, therapists, intake specialists, and billing specialists. Since proton therapy is a specialized procedure that is not appropriate for every disease type and location, the clinical history, disease type and progression, and imaging geometry of each patient referred to the center was reviewed to determine whether they were a good candidate. All of the physicians present at these meetings were members of the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance network, which includes the proton center, the University of Washington, the Seattle Children's Hospital, Harborview Hospital (which has GammaKnife), and several others. It was heartening to see that patient care was the top priority in these meetings rather than simply finding any possible reason to keep them at the proton center. Less heartening was having to consider billing as part of the selection process, since proton therapy is still not covered by every insurance plan. Our billing specialist advised us on whether some patients would likely be approved without a fight, which might be approved with a justification document, and which would be a hard sell to the insurance companies.
The other weekly meeting at the proton center was dosimetry plan review, which was also attended by physicists and physicians. Each plan was already reviewed and approved by the assigned attending doctor and physicist, but this meeting functioned as a peer review process to make sure that the plan followed best practices as understood by the group. It could also function as a teaching session if a new technique or practice should be shared with others.
At Loyola University Medical Center, my internship site, I attend chart rounds every week. It is my responsibility to load each patient's plan on the main projector screen as it is brought up for discussion and to highlight key points such as unusual anatomic features, dose distribution over critical organs, and DVH statistics. The meetings are fast paced and I have to keep pace on the loading process while also keeping an ear open as the physicians discuss each patient to make sure I will be able to highlight the key points. Medical residents also attend chart rounds, and I frequently get to hear the physicians grilling them on some key point of discussion or another such as which nodal groups need to be covered, the tolerances of various organs, or the findings of recent literature related to the treatment.
Consult reviews were meetings that included physicians, physicists, dosimetrists, therapists, intake specialists, and billing specialists. Since proton therapy is a specialized procedure that is not appropriate for every disease type and location, the clinical history, disease type and progression, and imaging geometry of each patient referred to the center was reviewed to determine whether they were a good candidate. All of the physicians present at these meetings were members of the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance network, which includes the proton center, the University of Washington, the Seattle Children's Hospital, Harborview Hospital (which has GammaKnife), and several others. It was heartening to see that patient care was the top priority in these meetings rather than simply finding any possible reason to keep them at the proton center. Less heartening was having to consider billing as part of the selection process, since proton therapy is still not covered by every insurance plan. Our billing specialist advised us on whether some patients would likely be approved without a fight, which might be approved with a justification document, and which would be a hard sell to the insurance companies.
The other weekly meeting at the proton center was dosimetry plan review, which was also attended by physicists and physicians. Each plan was already reviewed and approved by the assigned attending doctor and physicist, but this meeting functioned as a peer review process to make sure that the plan followed best practices as understood by the group. It could also function as a teaching session if a new technique or practice should be shared with others.
At Loyola University Medical Center, my internship site, I attend chart rounds every week. It is my responsibility to load each patient's plan on the main projector screen as it is brought up for discussion and to highlight key points such as unusual anatomic features, dose distribution over critical organs, and DVH statistics. The meetings are fast paced and I have to keep pace on the loading process while also keeping an ear open as the physicians discuss each patient to make sure I will be able to highlight the key points. Medical residents also attend chart rounds, and I frequently get to hear the physicians grilling them on some key point of discussion or another such as which nodal groups need to be covered, the tolerances of various organs, or the findings of recent literature related to the treatment.
Published June 19, 2015