OPTIMAX 2016 was held at the University of Salford
in Greater Manchester. It is the fourth summer
school of OPTIMAX with other renditions having
been organized at the University of Salford (2013),
ESTeSL, Lisbon (2014) and Hanze UAS, Groningen
(2015). For OPTIMAX 2016, 72 people participated
from eleven countries, comprising PhD, MSc and BSc
students as well as tutors from the seven European
partner universities. Professional mix was drawn
from engineering, medical physics/ physics and
radiography. OPTIMAX 2016 was partly funded by
the partner universities and partly by the participants.
Two students from South Africa and two from Brazil
were invited by Hanze UAS (Groningen) and ESTeSL
(Lisbon). One student from the United Kingdom was
funded by the Nuffield Foundation. The summer
school included lectures and group projects in
which experimental research was conducted in five
teams. Each team project focus varied and included:
optimization of full spine curvature radiography
in paediatrics; ultrasound assessment of muscle
thickness and muscle cross-sectional area: a
reliability study; the Influence of Source-to-Image
Distance on Effective Dose and Image Quality for
Mobile Chest X-rays; Impact of the anode heel effect
on image quality and effective dose for AP Pelvis:
A pilot study; and the impact of pitch values on
Image Quality and radiation dose in an abdominal
adult phantom using CT. OPTIMAX 2016 culminated
in a poster session and a conference, in which the
research teams presented their posters and oral
presentations.
This book comprises of two sections, the first four
chapters concern generic background information
which has value to summer school organization and
also theory on which the research projects were built.
The second section contains the research papers
in written format. The research papers have been
accepted for the ECR conference, Vienna, 2017 as
either oral presentations or posters
