24 Background: Radiation therapy is an essential component of cancer care used for palliative and curative treatments access a wide spectrum of disease, but many low- and middle-income countries do not have equitable access to this technology or training in the radiation sciences. Towards this end, we launched a pilot program to teach the principles of radiation biology and radiation physics that are a basic component of training and credentialing of radiation oncologists in the United States. Methods: We designed a 5 days curriculum for radiation biology and radiation physics that were similar in depth and scope to the courses taught to residents at MD Anderson. Medical oncologists, medical students and radiation therapists from Zambia, Tanzania, Lesotho, as well as Papua New Guinea attended the course. All have experience with direct patient care in oncology, but no formal training in radiation biology or physics. A pre-test of 50 multiple choice questions for radiation biology and 40 multiple choice questions for radiation physics was administered to all students prior any instruction on the first day of the course, and the same test was given on the last day. Each question stem had 4 possible choices. Instructions consisted of lectures and problems sets with an emphasis on practical applications of radiation biology and physics. Results: The students (N = 22) scored a mean of 30.6±13.5% correct on the radiation biology pre-test and this improved to a mean of 57.7±13.1% after 5 days of instruction (P < 0.0001). Similarly, the students who took the medical physics exam (N = 22) had a mean 33.0±8.8% correct at baseline, which improved to 61.7±18.1% on the post-test (P < 0.0001). Conclusions: Despite almost no prior exposure to these complicated concepts, students exhibited nearly a two-fold increase in scores on a standardized test of radiation biology and medical physics. This pilot study demonstrates a proof-of-concept that this material can be taught effectively in a short time frame. Further refinement of this material may allow similar in-person intensive courses, teleconferencing, or archived videos to improve the education of radiation therapists in low- and middle-income countries.
SP-0389: Nanodosimetry: from radiation physics to radiation biology
