Medical physics degree: A mature choice for Greece

Abstract

Almost all major engineering university schools now have a department of biomedical engineering. Biomedical engineering is now an equal to electrical, mechanical, civil and chemical engineering. Additionally the industrial sector in medical physics on ionizing and non-ionizing radiation as well as on biomedical engineering is also advancing and evolving quickly. Physicists as engineers can find numerous and lucrative opportunities with companies. Consequently medical physics is currently the most rapidly growing field of physics. Numerous academic, clinical and industrial opportunities are open to physicists in the medical world. In Europe today a number of physics and engineering undergraduates proceed to postgraduate programs to become professional medical physicists. Students are interested in medical physics for a number of reasons. There are equally good reasons for the faculty to provide a course in medical physics. This is another motivation for the development of an undergraduate medical physics course. Finally according to latest EU directives for education and professions undergraduate education is of major importance. This the first report of a higher degree level course on medical physics developed and introduced at Technological Educational Institute of Patras in Greece partly due to student interest, and partly due to the faculty's desire to provide interesting courses, resulting the tight cooperation of Health Science and Engineering Schools. While this is certainly good news, the curriculum have been designed with extreme care. If too much of the core physics material is removed to free up time for the discipline-specific material, there's a serious risk of graduating students that do not have a sufficiently strong foundation on which to build a career as a professional medical physicist. More discussion under national and international organizations will also improve this choice of TEI of Patras. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.