Medical Physics is a very dynamic profession – the
decades changed dramatically most of its areas,
introducing new methods and equipment with speed, which
requires constant update of one’s knowledge. The project
to develop an Encyclopaedia of Medical Physics took over
10 years, it was initiated in 2000 with the development
of a Thesaurus and Scientific Dictionary of Medical
Physics Terms. This activity was made as an EU project
proposal (EMIT). The EMIT project was a continuation of
the EMERALD project (the first e-learning project in the
profession) – another activity of the core partners of
EMIT with support from the EU. While EMERALD developed
e-materials to support the training of young medical
physicists in 3 field (X-Ray Diagnostic Radiology,
Nuclear Medicine and Radiotherapy), EMIT continued with
such materials in the fields of Magnetic Resonance and
Ultrasound imaging. Initially, the Thesaurus and
Scientific Dictionary of Medical Physics Terms were made
in English and were translated to the languages of the
EMIT Project partners: English, French, German, Swedish
and Italian. All these e-learning materials and the
Dictionary were made for free use from the colleagues in
the profession. During the developments of the above
projects (EMERALD 1995-1998 and EMIT 2001-2003) many of
their parts were tested at the ICTP College on Medical
Physics. After the completion of project EMIT in 2003,
it was nominated for the inaugural EU Award for
education – The Leonardo da Vinci Award, which was
presented to the project in 2004.
The students from
the ICTP College on Medical Physics were constantly
using the results of the above projects and the best of
them were gradually included in an unfunded activity (a
long lasting project) aiming to translate the English
Thesaurus of Medical Physics Terms to many other
languages. By 2019 the Scientific Dictionary was
translated to 29 languages (11 alphabets): English,
French, German, Italian, Swedish, Spanish, Portuguese,
Bulgarian, Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Polish,
Estonian, Romanian, Turkish, Latvian, Russian, Thai,
Arabic, Iranian, Bengal, Slovenian, Malay, Chinese,
Croatian, Japanese, Finnish, Korean, Georgian (listed as
per their inclusion).
In parallel with the above a
new EU project proposal (EMITEL) was made in 2005,
aiming to develop an Encyclopaedia of Medical Physics
Terms, based on the existing Thesaurus of Terms. The
project expanded beyond the EU through the already
created network of specialists and included over 300
specialists from 36 countries – the largest project in
the profession. A special website www.emitel2.eu was
made by the project partner AM Studio (especially Prof.
M Stoeva), who continues to support free the updates of
the Encyclopaedia and Scientific Dictionary. EMITEL
projects completed the Encyclopaedia in 2009. Since this
time the free website has over 8,000 users per month,
especially from Low-and-Middle-Income (LMI) countries.
From 2010 another unfunded activity was initiated aiming
to prepare the web e-Encyclopaedia into a paper book.
The book was published by CRC Press in 2013. The
unfunded activity continued with updates of the
Dictionary and Encyclopaedia made by colleagues from
various countries and coordinated by S Tabakov. In 2016
this activity entered another free phase – preparing an
update and second paper print of the e-Encyclopaedia.
This phase was initiated by a group of the active
members of the initial stages of EMITEL, who gathered
new team of contributors to revise the existing material
and to add new medical physics terms and to create new
encyclopaedic entries for these.
These projects and
activities supported significantly the global
development of the profession, especially in the LMI
countries. The many phases during these 20 years of
projects and activities (funded and unfunded) are
described by their developer and coordinator in the book
“The Pioneering of e-Learning in Medical Physics”,
S.Tabakov, V Tabakova, 2015, which can be downloaded
free from: http://www.emerald2.eu/mep_15.html
The
book is s dedicated to all colleagues, sponsors and
friends, who contributed to the pioneering work of these
projects and supported their results.
The main
contributors of the final phases of the EMITEL
Encyclopaedia and Dictionary (by 2018) are listed in
page Contributors.
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