Название: MATLAB for Medical Physics: Real-life Clinical Scenarios and Projects
Автор: Jidi Sun
Издательство: Springer
Год: 2023
Страниц: 288
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 10.2 MB

This book gives the practical introduction for medical physics students and clinical physicists to learn MATLAB programming. The first part of the book explains the MATLAB software layout and ways to get help followed by the demonstration of the fundamentals of MATLAB programming through over 100 examples. The second part of the book features eighteen real-life clinical scenarios and projects and twenty-three scenario expansions. The scenarios cover many of the common clinical medical physics areas including DICOM file manipulation, film dosimetry, brachytherapy application, linear accelerator and CT quality assurance and their automations, medical image processing and analysis. All scenarios include the step-by-step solution as a guidance for readers to learn MATLAB by practicing. The data files (e.g. DICOM) used for all clinical scenarios are provided.

During the past 13 years of researching, teaching, clinical training and work, I have been using MATLAB to find effective and efficient solutions to daily problems and to create multiple open-source automatic image quality assurance software. In mid-2019, I had this idea to share my MATLAB experiences with the medical physics community through some of the work that I have done over the past years.

MATLAB is a mature, well-resourced, constantly maintained and updated commercial programming software. It allows users to perform numerical analysis, but more importantly MATLAB comes with a large collection of toolboxes that are designed for solving standard problems in different areas. Because of this, MATLAB has been widely used in the scientific and engineering areas. As a result, MATLAB becomes one of the mandatory undergraduate courses at many universities. The best way to learn MATLAB is by solving problems. Often the undergraduate course briefly introduces the basics of MATLAB and teaches students using some general mathematical problems as examples. For medical physics postgraduate students and clinical medical physicists, the clinical scenarios are more relevant because they are the daily problems that physicists face. Therefore, this book uses the clinical scenarios as examples to introduce and demonstrate MATLAB with supplied data files.

This book is structured into two main parts. The first part (Chap. 1) introduces the fundamentals of the MATLAB software, so that the readers can be confident to use MATLAB to solve simple problems. This part is designed for readers who has no or limited experiences in MATLAB. It first introduces the MATLAB software layout to help readers to orient around the software. Then it showed readers various ways to get help. Finally, the basics of MATLAB is introduced systematically with over 100 examples. In terms of the knowledge introduced in this part, it is not too different from other MATLAB introduction textbooks. However, I have used clinically relevant problems in some examples where are appropriate. The intermediate and advanced MATLAB users can skip the first part. The second part of the book (Chaps. 2–4) focuses on using MATLAB to solve routine clinical problems that medical physicists may face on daily basis. A total of 18 real-life clinical scenarios were included to demonstrate how to use MATLAB to solve complex problems. The scenarios cover areas including DICOM file manipulation, film dosimetry, brachytherapy application, linac and CT quality assurance and their automations. Some of these 18 scenarios were further modified to expand to additional 23 clinical scenario expansions. For all the examples and clinical scenarios and their expansions in this book, the step-by-step solutions are provided as well as coding explanations. The data files (e.g. DICOM) used for all clinical scenarios are provided. The code and data files can be downloaded from site.