Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: I am the current and the 64th President of the AAPM. As the Reed and Martha Rice Distinguished Professor of Radiology at Duke University, I lead an NIH-funded national research center (Center for Virtual Imaging Trials, established 2020) and, since 2008, have served as the Chief Imaging Physicist for the Duke University Health System. Throughout my 30 years with the AAPM and prior to being elected to its presidency, I served on over 30 task groups and committees, eight as chair or co-chair, led the scientific program for two annual meetings (San Diego and Pittsburgh), and served on the Board of Directors and Strategic Planning Committees. I have participated in tens of AAPM initiatives, including Medical Physics 3.0 as its founding chair, given hundreds of talks at the AAPM meetings, and published over 130 papers in AAPM journals. While active in multiple professional organizations, I have always considered the AAPM to be my professional home. Being the AAPM President is an awesome responsibility, as many of my colleagues in this issue will attest. The largest national organization of the discipline, the AAPM defines and continuously reshapes the field of medical physics through a staggering number of committees (nearly 400, more than many peer organizations of even larger membership). The real forces behind these committees are thousands of individual members who volunteer their time, energy, and intelligence. The committees build consensus across diverse inputs into something that can be owned by us all to the betterment of our discipline and our profession. As President, I ask myself “what is my role in all this?” My answer is coordination and direction: coordination because individually driven initiatives are focused (appropriately) towards their own goals, which must be coordinated with one another to maximize efficiency and to minimize potential conflicts. And direction not in the sense of dictating but rather in the sense of conducting, as with train systems and orchestras, where a conductor assures that well-crafted, individual lines are purposed into a harmonious integral whole. In my “conducting” contribution to the AAPM, still in the works, I am inspired to foster a closer alignment between our field and the big challenges in medicine, a stronger focus on patient-centered care (“Physics for Patients” as opposed to “Physics for Machines”), and deeper ownership of our responsibility for the appropriation of technologies into actual clinical practice. In pursuing these, I hope we can build a stronger community together, a topic that I reflected upon in two recent Newsletter articles1, 2 and an op-ed exposition.3 The 65th AAPM Annual Meeting this year is being held in Houston, a city renowned for its medical physics scholarship and practice. Houston was the host of our well-celebrated 50th anniversary in 2008. In some ways, we have gone back to our roots. The 2023 meeting is building upon this strong legacy, and will make a new statement of its own: “The Art of Science, The Science of Care.” This theme echoes the reality that the discipline of medical physics is rooted in ingenuity, imagination, and creativity (art), enacted within one of the highest embodiments of human intelligence (physics), and all that translates into a practice with direct human benefit (health). The juxtaposition of these three strands reminds us of what an awesome privilege it is to be a medical physicist, a person with the deep calling, opportunity, and responsibility to put thought and heart towards advancing human welfare. The meeting echoes the themes of dignity (of our calling to care about the patient and the science), stewardship (of our intelligence, drive, and imagination), and purposefulness (of our technologies and applications). The Presidential Symposium will include luminary presenters that cover these topics, further exemplified through 5 days of dedicated scientific, educational, and professional offerings. I am still in the middle of my presidential year, so the jury is still out as to what will be the legacy of my leadership—legacy is ascertained only retrospectively. But anybody who has served or will serve as President of the AAPM is extremely privileged to be given the opportunity to have a legacy with the primary formative organization behind the very discipline of medical physics. I hope my legacy will include a realization of the dignity of our calling, and the necessity of purposefulness and collaboration in carrying it out. Using my orchestra analogy again, we have music to play, for an audience that needs to hear it, and we can only do so when we each play our own beautiful melodies on our unique instruments, and then combine these diverse offerings harmoniously into something much more elegant than any of us could form on our own. As a physicist, I cannot say too many negative things about math. But here is one place that I would say that math is wrong, because in this case, 1 + 1 = 5.
Source: Medical Physics
DOI: 10.1002/mp.16037
Author: Ehsan Samei
Institution: Duke University Health System
Language: English
Subfield: Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4383868488