Krishni Wijesooriya, PhD
University of Virginia
Three Things that will Help you Pass the
Boards
Gain clinical experience in both external beam and
brachytherapy
Read, read, and read more
Be very confident about what you know
Need to have enough experience….
Annual, monthly QA of a machine many times while paying
attention to related TG reports, and factors of importance so
that by looking at a curve can detect problems of the machine.
Be familiar with the daily clinical work, with factors of
importance to do a back of the envelope hand calc.
Nice to have the experience of commissioning a machine, but
not necessary
External beam planning
Enough experience with brachytherapy HDR/LDR
planning/QA/delivery
Some experience with special procedures
Material I used for Oral preparation
TG reports
NCRP reports
Books
Summer schools
Review Courses
Manuals from all sorts of detector systems we use
RTOG protocols
TG Reports
TG 25 – e- beam dosimetry
TG 51 – QA for linear accelerators
TG 40 – General QA
AAPM IMRT Guidance document
TG 36- Fetal Dose
TG 42 - Stereotactic radio Surgery
TG 29– TBI
TG 59 – HDR Brachy
TG 64 – PSI
TG 43 – Brachytherapy dose calculation
NCRP reports
NCRP Report No 147 – Structural shielding design for
medical Xray imaging facilities
NCRP Report No 151 – Structural design and evaluation
for megavoltage x- and gamma-ray radiotherapy facilities
Lots and lots of shielding calculations for different
scenarios
Some of the Books I used..
Linear Accelerators for Radiation Therapy by D
Greene and PC Williams
Shielding Techniques by Patton McGinley
Physics in nuclear medicine by Simon Cherry
The Physics of Radiation Therapy by Faiz Khan
The essential physics of medical imaging by
Bushberg
Summer schools
Brachytherapy Physics – 2005
Shielding methods for medical facilities – 2007
Monte Carlo and image guided radiation therapy – 2006
Clinical Dosimetry Measurements in Radiotherapy – 2009
willl be a good one!
ARC Physics Oral Review Course
Very useful in preparing for the ABR orals!
Gives a thorough summary of all aspects of clinical
physics and what you need to know
Fully worth the money
Nice if you could take the course 3/4 months prior to
exam - > gives enough time to add your own to it
Stay in Louiville
The airport is so close to the exam hotel
So at night some times you get disturbed by the airplane
noises
But the other option is to stay quite far, which would not
have worked well, due to last minute preparation and
panic
Airport is extremely small if you go at night, trying to
grab some thing to eat is difficult
Exam itself
My experience with the examiners has been mostly
positive
I think this is one of the few places where we got a real
audience
Some examiners are talkative, and others are not -> hard
to say which one is better
Questions are clear and images are good
They keep track of the time well
My tricks
I found out that examiners are pretty flexible about the
order of answers to the question list on the screen
It is totally up to us to navigate
Best option is to answer the questions you know well
first and spend the rest of the time answering harder
ones.
Some times if you answer most of the list you will
still pass, and might not even have time to get to the
end of the list
Plus you get a moral boost by then
Recommendation for ABR Oral
Examiners
Difficulty in quickly figuring out the orientation of
some detector diagrams
Some radiation safely questions are very outdated –
and only a handful of places do them – need to
upgrade the questions pool
The same question repeated by two examiners – if you
fail to answer once, you are counted against 2/5 times,
and you probably will be conditioned on that section
GOOD LUCK!