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Bad boys
10:05 Wednesday CT: When I saw Radiological Imaging Technology’s (RIT) latest advertising poster I had to go and find out more. It features leather clad men and a very hot custom motorcycle – not the usual marketing tactic of QA software vendors. Apparently, however, if you’re a medical physicist then it’s not only the motorcycle that’s hot. RIT has just launched version 5 (V5) of its QA software package RIT113, and according to vice president of marketing Ellen Ritt, the new features are getting physicists at the show “very excited”.
Physicists aren’t usually the most excitable of people, so what’s all the fuss about? As well as many new time-saving features, V5 includes a “unique correction algorithm” that can be used to get more information from radiochromic film. Hospital physicists are under increasing pressure these days to find an alternative to the wet-film techniques traditionally used for many QA tasks. Wet film provides good-quality images, but processing it is costly and time-consuming. As a result, many hospitals are switching to radiochromic film.
Radiochromic film - much like Polaroid film - is very convenient because it doesn’t need to be processed. The drawback is that you can’t achieve the same level of image quality as you can with wet film. The new V5 software, however, has an image analysis tool that RIT claims can correct for this, allowing QA physicists to get as much information from radiochromic film images as they could get from wet film images. If it lives up to the marketing hype, then it sounds like this could make a lot of hospital physicists’ jobs much easier.
RIT is inviting AAPM attendees to “test drive” V5 at its booth, so go along and see if it really is all it’s cracked up to be. And if you’re lucky staff will even give you some free (temporary) tattoos to complete the bad-boy image. Sadly, however, there is no sign of a prize draw or raffle to win the motorcycle.
