Citations

Abstract Clinical medical physics is a profession that intersects with various groups as part of a broader healthcare team, including dosimetrists, radiation therapists, radiologic and MRI technologists, IT specialists, and physicians. Success in this field requires academic and technical excellence as well as comprehensive skills for working effectively within an interdisciplinary healthcare team. When hiring medical physics residents, the selection of well‐rounded and highly qualified candidates can be facilitated through a holistic review process that ensures consideration of traditional metrics such as academic performance while also accounting for the importance of various experiences, personal attributes, and intrinsic motivations that impact clinical performance and patient care. The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) emphasizes an overall consideration of Experiences, Attributes, Competencies, and Metrics (EACM) as important for the search process. As part of the healthcare community, medical physics shares the same commitment to high‐quality patient care. By adopting the AAMC's EACM framework, medical physics residency programs can strengthen the fairness, rigor, and overall effectiveness of their application review processes—ultimately benefiting applicants, the medical physics community, and the patients we serve. This Society of Directors of Academic Medical Physics Programs (SDAMPP) task report aims to provide information and resources for applying holistic review to the applicant selection process for medical physics residency programs. Our objective is to enable program directors to reevaluate their selection methods in the context of institutional and program missions and goals and to improve the quality and specificity of recruitment by integrating holistic review concepts into their residency recruitment processes. This initiative can inspire change in recruitment practices, aid programs in hiring well‐rounded and well‐qualified residents, and support the professional growth of our trainees in healthcare. This report provides an overview of holistic reviews and its core principles. We review the current literature and provide evidence from successful implementations of holistic review in other medical fields to illustrate how it can benefit our field. Furthermore, we outline actionable recommendations to facilitate transitioning to a holistic review framework and address potential barriers with practical solutions. A supplemental workbook is provided to guide residency programs in developing their own holistic application review and interview processes. With this report, we aim to provide practical implementation guidelines that will allow residency program directors to implement a selection methodology that comprehensively assesses the full qualifications of individual candidates and ultimately fosters the development of versatile and competent clinical medical physicists who are best equipped to advance the field, meet patient needs, and improve patient care.

AbstractConcept inventories are multiple choice exams designed with the intention to test core concepts on specific subjects and evaluate common misconceptions. These tests serve as a useful tool in the classroom to assess value added by the instructor's educational methods and to better understand how students learn. They can provide educators with a method to evaluate their current teaching strategies and to make modifications that enhance student learning and ultimately elevate the quality of medical physics education. The use of concept inventories in introductory college physics courses revealed important gaps in conceptual understanding of physics by undergraduate students and motivated a shift of physics teaching towards more effective methods, such as active learning techniques. The goal of this review is to introduce medical physicists to concept inventories as educational evaluation tools and discuss potential applications to medical physics education by development through multi‐institutional collaboration.

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), a disease associated with excessive sleepiness and increased cardiovascular risk, affects an estimated 1 billion people worldwide. The present study examined proteomic biomarkers indicative of presence, severity, and treatment response in OSA. Participants (n = 1391) of the Stanford Technology Analytics and Genomics in Sleep study had blood collected and completed an overnight polysomnography for scoring the apnea–hypopnea index (AHI). A highly multiplexed aptamer-based array (SomaScan) was used to quantify 5000 proteins in all plasma samples. Two separate intervention-based cohorts with sleep apnea (n = 41) provided samples pre- and post-continuous/positive airway pressure (CPAP/PAP). Multivariate analyses identified 84 proteins (47 positively, 37 negatively) associated with AHI after correction for multiple testing. Of the top 15 features from a machine learning classifier for AHI ≥ 15 vs. AHI < 15 (Area Under the Curve (AUC) = 0.74), 8 were significant markers of both AHI and OSA from multivariate analyses. Exploration of pre- and post-intervention analysis identified 5 of the 84 proteins to be significantly decreased following CPAP/PAP treatment, with pathways involving endothelial function, blood coagulation, and inflammatory response. The present study identified PAI-1, tPA, and sE-Selectin as key biomarkers and suggests that endothelial dysfunction and increased coagulopathy are important consequences of OSA, which may explain the association with cardiovascular disease and stroke.

In this Technical Note, we describe an in‐house video goggles feedback system assembled using several commercially available products. This goggle video feedback system is currently being used at University of Louisville and Mayo Clinic for both CT simulation and linac treatment delivery. The setup details, including specific recommendations, are provided, along with an alternative option for using the video goggles system.PACS number: 07.07Hj