Building Capacity in Medical Physics for Radiological Imaging: Role of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)

The symbiotic relationship between physics and medicine has probably never been more evident, than in the development of radiological imaging for medical purposes. From the time of Röntgen, physicists have prepared the way through discovery and invention to be rewarded by the energetic uptake of an enthusiastic medical community. This rapidly established relationship allowed dissemination of the new medico-scientific technology, within months, to an eager world. Much slower however was the recognition that the indiscriminate use of radiation had unwanted harmful effects that were evident to both clinicians and patients, and experienced through personal suffering by both physicists and clinicians alike. The new discipline of dosimetry, or the measurement of radiation, arose out of this misfortune, and now is an essential element in the required knowledge needed for responsible radiation medicine. Of course, technology and medicine have continuously evolved over the last 100 years, with basic research from the imaging sciences, and the emergence of high-speed computers, allowing the primitive medical images produced by X-rays interacting with a fluorescent screen to make way for high-contrast sectional images from a computed tomography scanner, as but one example.