European Medical Physics and Engineering Conference 2012 Sofia

Prof. Peter SHARP Plenary talk: The Medical Physicist and Technology Assessment – introducing ideas into clinical practice
	Professor of Medical Physics at Aberdeen University and Clinical Director of Medical Physics until his retirement in August 2012. Involved in research into imaging techniques for over 40 years; initially in Nuclear Medicine and for the past 20 years also in ophthalmology. He set up the first clinical PET Centre in Scotland and chaired the committee advised the Scottish Government on the introduction of PET for cancer management for the whole of the Scottish health service. His research in ophthalmic imaging is mainly with regard to diabetic retinopathy. The software automatically analyzing retinal images is now being routinely used in Scotland’s diabetic retinopathy screening programme. President of the EFOMP, a past-President of the IPEM, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and an Affiliate member of the Royal College of Physicians of London. In the Queen’s Birthday Honours he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his services to healthcare science.
Prof. Madan REHANI Plenary talk: Increasing role of medical physicists in radiation protection
	Radiation Safety Specialist in Radiation Protection of Patients Unit of the IAEA, Vienna and managing projects in over 60 countries. He was earlier Professor & Head, Medical Physics Unit in the Cancer Hospital of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, India and Head of the WHO Collaborating Centre on Imaging Technology & Radiation Protection, which he established. Secretary of the Committee 3 of ICRP on Radiation Protection in Medicine; responsible for ICRP Publication Nos. 87, 102 and 117. Secretary-General of IOMP. He has been awarded the Harold Johns Medal by the IOMP in 2009 and a number of other awards. He has contributed Editorials in Int J of Cardiology, Brit Med Journal, Indian Journal of Radiology & Imaging and Indian J Nucl Med and published papers in many international scientific journals; edited 5 books. Responsible for development of large number of training material of the IAEA on radiation protection.
Prof. Slavik TABAKOV Pleanary talk: Medical Physics Education after the ISCO listing of the profession – Quo Vadis?
	Director of the Postgraduate programmes in MSc Medical Engineering and Physics and MSc Clinical Sciences at King’s College London. He was born and has graduated in Bulgaria and later specialized in USA, France, Germany and UK. He has taken academic positions in the field of X-ray imaging at Medical University Plovdiv. Leading developer of the concept of e-Learning in Medical Physics, the fist educational Image Databases, the first e-books and the first e-Encyclopaedia of Medical Physics and related Multilingual Dictionary of terms (30 languages). Co-author of 7 textbooks, 5 e-books, 5 Image database CD-ROMs, 3 Teaching web sites and approx. 100 papers. He has coordinated 7 International projects, one of which received the EU Leonardo da Vinci Award (2004). He has advised on the development of Medical Physics and Engineering Education courses in 15 countries. Awarded in 2006 with the IOMP Harold Johns Medal for Excellence in Teaching and International Education Leadership. Coordinating Director of the Medical Physics College at ICTP, Trieste (UNESCO/IAEA). Active officer of the IOMP from 2000 and Vice President (President-Elect) of the IOMP from 2012.
Prof. Jeff HAND Invited talk: Safety in MRI: an overview
	Senior Research Associate in the Division of Imaging Sciences and Bioengineering at King’s College London and Visiting Professor of Imaging Physics at Imperial College London. Previous appointments include Director of the Radiological Sciences Unit at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust in London and research posts at the UK Medical Research Council’s Cyclotron Unit, London, at Stanford University and the University of Arizona in the USA, and at Shimane Medical University at Izumo in Japan. He has DSc and PhD degrees from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, and a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine. His interests include therapeutic and diagnostic applications of non-ionising radiations in medicine, including the modeling of MRI devices and MR safety related problems. He has authored some 200 scientific papers in journals and books.
Prof. John DAMILAKIS Invited talk: X-ray imaging during pregnancy: How can we estimate the dose and the radiation risk to the conceptus?
	Chairman of the Medical Physics Department at the University of Crete, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Crete and Head of the Medical Physics Department at the University Hospital of Heraklion, Crete, Greece. An active researcher and author оf more than 200 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals, 22 of which published in Medical Physics journal. He has given more than 130 invited lectures at national and international meetings. Member of the Editorial Board of several scientific journals including European Radiology (section editor for Medical Physics), and Investigative Radiology. Recently elected as chairman of the Education and Training Committee of the IOMP for the period 2012-2015. Past services: Member of the Program Planning Committee of the European Congress of Radiology, Vice Chairman of the VI International Conference on Medical Physics, President of the Hellenic Association of Medical Physicists.
Dr. Giovanni BORTOLAN Invited talk: Principal Component Analysis in the detection of T wave and QRS complex alternans in stress test ECG recordings
	Giovanni Bortolan received the laurea degree from the University of Padova, Padova, Italy in 1978. From 1981 he was a Research Fellow and presently he is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering (LADSEB, ISIB from 2002) of the Italian National Research Council. He has published numerous papers in the area of medical informatics and applied fuzzy sets. He is actively pursuing research in medical informatics in computerized electrocardiography, neural networks, fuzzy sets, data mining, pattern recognition. His research Interests include Cardiovascular engineering; Computer science; 2D/3D signal analysis; Reasoning under uncertainty; Soft Computing; Medical Informatics. He has been involved in several national and international projects: European concerted action Common Standards for quantitative Electrocardiogaphy CSE; AIM / SCP-ECG: Standard Communication Protocol for Computerized Electrocardiography; ILSA: Italian Longitudinal Study on Aging.
Prof. Hilde BOSMANS Invited talk: New developments in breast imaging
	Hilde Bosmans is professor in Medical Physics at the University of Leuven and Liege, Belgium. She leads a team of medical physics experts in radiology and is in this role responsible for physico-technical quality conform all regulations and good working practice in the university hospitals of Leuven, in a selection of network hospitals and in 103 mammography units in the Belgian breast cancer screening.She is board member of EFOMP and consultant physicists of the physic-technical steering group of EUREF. Research interests include in particular mammography physics, CT dosimetry, diffusion MRI and automated and optimized QA. At this moment, she has 5 PhD students as promotor and 5 PhD students as co-promotor.
Prof. Ioannis KANDARAKIS Invited talk: New developments in Radiation Detectors for Medical Imaging
	Professor and Head of Department at the Technological Educational Institution (TEI) of Athens, Department of Medical Instruments Technology. Education-Qualifications: First degree in Physics and Postgraduate and Doctorate degrees in Medical Radiological Physics. Teaching experience in: Medical Physics, Medical Imaging Systems (x-ray imaging, Nuclear Medicine) in both undergraduate and postgraduate courses. Areas of research: Medical Imaging Detectors: scintillator and phosphor materials evaluation for application in detectors of x-ray and gamma-ray medical imaging systems (Experimental and theoretical methods). Evaluation of medical imaging systems. Monte Carlo simulation methods applied in Physics of Diagnostic Radiology and Nuclear Medicine. Participation in many funded research projects, doctorate supervising committees and in international conference scientific committees. Scientific Publications: 90 original papers in peer reviewed international scientific journals and approximately 140 original publications in international scientific conference proceedings and conference abstract books.
Prof. Lachezar AVRAMOV Invited talk: Photodynamic medicine – from scientific ideas to real cancer combat
	Professor, PhD, DSc, head of the Laboratory of Biophotonics of the Institute of Electronics, Bulgarian Academy of Science and of the National Center of Biomedical Photonics, Sofia, Bulgaria. He has long-lasting experience in the field of investigations of interactions of light and laser radiation with biological structures and development of modern methods and equipment for biomedical applications. His experience was in use to found OPTELLA Ltd. like typical academic spin-off enterprise. Numerous apparatus were developed and introduced in the Bulgarian healthcare network under his leadership. The results, related with the scientific investigations and clinical effects were published in more of 150 journals and international conferences.
Dr. Iwan KAWRAKOW Invited talk: To be announced later
	Dr. Kawrakow was born in Bulgaria. He obtained PhD in theoretical physics in 1994 from the University of Leizpig, Germany. His employment records include: Postdoctoral positions in Leizpig and Ottawa, Canada (1994-1998); Senior research officer at the National Research Council of Canada (1998-2010); Principal Key Expert at Siemens AG (Healthcare) 2010-2012; Director of Science at ViewRay Inc. since April 2012. His main research interests include radiation physics and dosimetry, transport theory, Monte Carlo simulations, radiation therapy dose calculation and optimization, medical imaging, numerical methods in Medical Physics. Author of EGSnrc package for the Monte Carlo simulation of coupled electron-photon transport, considered to be the “golden standard” in the Medical Physics community, and author/co-author of the VMC/xVMC/VMC++ series of codes for fast dose calculations in Radiation Therapy widely used in commercial treatment planning software. Author of many peer-reviewed papers and conference contributions.
Dr. Penelope ALLISY-ROBERTS Invited talk: International traceability for dosimetry
	Head of the Ionising Radiation Section, Bureau Inernational des Poids et Mesures, France, Dr Allisy-Roberts obtained a BSc in Physics from the University of Birnimgham in 1970. She went on to study for the MSc in Radiobiology, achieving the degree in 1971. Continuing at the same University, she obtained a PhD in Radiological Physics in 1980. Currently responsible for the international standards of radiation dosimetry and radioactivity measurements, she was previously Director of Medical Physics and Engineering, Southampton University Hospitals (1991-1994) and Consultant Physicist, Head of Regional Radiation Physics and Protection Services in the Department of Medical Physics at the Queen Elizabeth Medical Centre, Birmingham (1988-1990). She has served on many influential National and International committees dealing with radiation protection affairs and in 2002 was awarded the Founders’ Prize by the Society for Radiological Protection.
Dr. Alberto TORRESIN Invited talk: Requirements to MRI and MRS to be applicable for radiation treatment
	Director of Struttura Complessa di Fisica Sanitaria (Medical Physics Dep.), Ospedale Niguarda Ca’ Granda– Milan. Qualified Expert in Radiaction Protection (electron, photons, neutron), Medical Physics and Magnetic Resonance. Professor of Medical Physics at the University of Physics of Milan, Italy. Coordinator of number of working groups: on development of Italian protocol for computed tomography; Italian group of Medical Image Processing; Treatment Planning 3D group; Procedures in quality control in diagnostics images (CT, MRI, RX, Nuclear Medicine). Director of the Superior School of Physics in Medicine P. Caldirola. Speaker, moderator and coordinator of congresses, courses, seminars. Reviewer of Medical Physics and other scientific journals. Chairman of the Scientific Committee of EFOMP; member of the Scientific committee of IOMP; Member of the Steering Scientific Committee of the European Institute for Biomedical Imaging Research.
Dr. Virginia TSAPAKI Invited talk: Optimization of radiation protection in diagnostic and interventional radiology: which is the future?
	Head of Medical Physics Department, Konstantopoulio General Hospital of Athens in Greece. She has more than 21 years of experience in medical physics. Just elected as President of Hellenic Association of Medical Physicists (HAMP). Chair of the EFOMP Communication and Publication committee for 2012-2013, Chair of electronic Medical Physics World board of International Organization for Medical Physics (IOMP) bulletin and Chair of the IOMP website subcommittee for the time period of 2012-2015. IAEA expert, participating in various IAEA research projects and IAEA training courses since 2004. Participant in a number of European projects and in some of them as an EFOMP expert. Author of 86 publications in SCI journals and national/international journals or conference proceedings, as well as 150 presentations or posters in national and international conferences.
Dr. Marco BRAMBILLA Invited talk: 18F-FDG PET/CT: segmentation and auto contouring for radiotherapy planning
	Head of the Regional Department of Medical Physics at the University Hospital of Novara and 8 provincial general hospitals in Italy. His main fields of interest are acceptance testing of Nuclear Medicine equipment, including SPECT, PET/CT; Optimization and dose reduction on Nuclear Medicine equipment; Molecular imaging in Radiation Oncology; Advanced imaging techniques for treatment planning and verification in Radiation Oncology; Angiographic image guidance; Dose reduction in CT imaging; Radioprotection. Author of 48 articles in peer reviewed national and international journals and book chapters. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Physica Medica EJMP. Since 2012 he is Secretary General of the European Federation of Medical Physics Organizations (EFOMP).
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Dobromir PRESSYANOV Invited talk: Reducing risk from radon exposure – an integrated approach
	Assoc. Professor at the Faculty of Physics of University of Sofia “St. Kliment Ohridski”. Graduated from University of Sofia in 1985 with M.Sc. degree in Nuclear and Particle Physics, and Ph.D. in 1993. From 1986 to 1991 he worked as a health physicist in the uranium industry and with sanitary inspection of the Ministry of Health. His main duties at that time were radiation control and radiation supervision in mining industry. His main research interests and achievements are in the field of radiation dosimetry, radon and environmental radioactivity. He was a visiting researcher in CEA-Saclay, France and University of Ghent, Belgium. In 2005-2009 he was an expert with the International Radon Project of the World Health Organization. Author of one monograph, 4 book-chapters, 3 patents and over 100 publications, mostly in peer-reviewed journals. An official referee of 8 international ISI-SCI indexed journals in the field of nuclear and environmental science, general physics and mathematics.
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ekaterina BORISOVA Invited talk: Optical biopsy – tool for initial cancer diagnosis and monitoring of therapy
	Assoc. Prof. and Scientific Secretary of the Institute of Electronics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Dr. Borisova had received MS in Medical Physics and MS in Laser Physics from Sofia University. She obtained PhD degree in Physics in 2005, working on the problems of fluorescence and reflectance techniques for detection of soft and hard tissues’ pathologies. Her recent investigations cover the field of molecular spectroscopy of biological samples, optical biopsy of human tissues and monitoring and detection of their pathological changes, as well as the problems of photodiagnosis and photodynamic therapy applications. Regular and invited editor in Journal on Biomedical Optics, Journal on Biophotonics, Journal on Innovative Optical Health Sciences, Recent patents on biomedical engineering. Her researches in the field of optical spectroscopy of human tissues for oncological applications were honored with the BAS Prize for best young scientist in the field of Physics (2004), and Prize “Pythagoras” for the Best scientist in Bulgaria in 2012.