MO‐E‐18C‐02: Hands‐On Monte Carlo Project Assignment as a Method to Teach Radiation Physics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose: To present a hands‐on project on Monte Carlo methods (MC) recently added to the curriculum and to discuss the students' appreciation. Methods: Since 2012, a 1.5 hour lecture dedicated to MC fundamentals follows the detailed presentation of photon and electron interactions. Students also program all sampling steps (interaction length and type, scattering angle, energy deposit) of a MC photon transport code. A handout structured in a step‐by‐step fashion guides student in conducting consistency checks. For extra points, students can code a fully working MC simulation, that simulates a dose distribution for 50 keV photons. A kerma approximation to dose deposition is assumed. A survey was conducted to which 10 out of the 14 attending students responded. It compared MC knowledge prior to and after the project, questioned the usefulness of radiation physics teaching through MC and surveyed possible project improvements. Results: According to the survey, 76% of students had no or a basic knowledge of MC methods before the class and 65% estimate to have a good to very good understanding of MC methods after attending the class. 80% of students feel that the MC project helped them significantly to understand simulations of dose distributions. On average, students dedicated 12.5 hours to the project and appreciated the balance between hand‐holding and questions/implications. Conclusion: A lecture on MC methods with a hands‐on MC programming project requiring about 14 hours was added to the graduate study curriculum since 2012. MC methods produce “gold standard” dose distributions and slowly enter routine clinical work and a fundamental understanding of MC methods should be a requirement for future students. Overall, the lecture and project helped students relate crosssections to dose depositions and presented numerical sampling methods behind the simulation of these dose distributions. Research funding from governments of Canada and Quebec. PP acknowledges partial support by the CREATE Medical Physics Research Training Network grant of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Grant number: 432290)
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.060 | 0.022 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".