Third‐party brachytherapy source calibrations and physicist responsibilities: Report of the AAPM Low Energy Brachytherapy Source Calibration Working Group
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The AAPM Low Energy Brachytherapy Source Calibration Working Group was formed to investigate and recommend quality control and quality assurance procedures for brachytherapy sources prior to clinical use. Compiling and clarifying recommendations established by previous AAPM Task Groups 40, 56, and 64 were among the working group's charges, which also included the role of third-party handlers to perform loading and assay of sources. This document presents the findings of the working group on the responsibilities of the institutional medical physicist and a clarification of the existing AAPM recommendations in the assay of brachytherapy sources. Responsibility for the performance and attestation of source assays rests with the institutional medical physicist, who must use calibration equipment appropriate for each source type used at the institution. Such equipment and calibration procedures shall ensure secondary traceability to a national standard. For each multi-source implant, 10% of the sources or ten sources, whichever is greater, are to be assayed. Procedures for presterilized source packaging are outlined. The mean source strength of the assayed sources must agree with the manufacturer's stated strength to within 3%, or action must be taken to resolve the difference. Third party assays do not absolve the institutional physicist from the responsibility to perform the institutional measurement and attest to the strength of the implanted sources. The AAPM leaves it to the discretion of the institutional medical physicist whether the manufacturer's or institutional physicist's measured value should be used in performing dosimetry calculations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".