Month: February 2024

I am designing a blended learning course for adult learners to refresh and strengthen their knowledge of CT anatomy (also called cross-sectional anatomy). This means finding anatomical structures on images that were acquired with a CT scanner. Looking at images this way is quite different than what we think of as regular X-rays. I am using the LMS Canvas which has impressed me with its clean, simple, intuitive design and has many of the features of robust LMS. I organized the course content into modules, and embedded H5P content created in Lumi.  The first couple of modules of this course focus on refreshing the learner’s knowledge of CT images and 2D radiographs. Being comfortable with orientating oneself to the various views available and understanding anatomical directional terms that are used to describe locations provides a strong foundation for learning cross-sectional anatomy.

Continue reading “Module Introduction through Lumi”

**Long Post Alert**

I enjoyed the readings for this week’s class as they provided clarity into what I was trying to achieve in my online classroom. Over the years, I have learned and applied different engagement strategies, however, my attempts to engage the students within an interactive online environment were not always as successful as I would like.
Completing the readings made me realize that what was missing was community. Yes! This is what I was trying to achieve…. the sense of community. Without being intentional about building a class community was a missed opportunity to properly engage the learners. Making this commitment as an educator means being mindful to who is in your class, and creating interactions that foster relationship building.
How could I have missed that!?

Continue reading “Building Community in a blended learning environment”

Background information

Radiation therapy is a common cancer treatment that uses high-energy x-rays to kill cancer cells or stop them from growing and dividing. It’s a localized treatment, meaning it targets specific areas of the body where cancer cells are present while minimizing damage to healthy surrounding tissue. The treatments are individually designed for each person’s anatomy and treatment target area; thus precision is required to deliver the planned dose. There are many factors that contribute to differences between the planned dose and the delivered dose. One such factor is reproducibility in patient position on the treatment unit. Patient positioning is crucial  in radiation therapy because it ensures accurate delivery of radiation to the targeted area while minimizing exposure to surrounding healthy tissues.

To ensure accurate patient positioning, image matching happens prior to each treatment and is performed while the patient is laying on the treatment couch waiting for the radiation beam to start. This is called Image Guided Radiation Therapy, or IGRT. Image matching in short, is looking at the image from the original “planned” treatment and matching it to the daily image of the patient on the treatment couch, the discrepancies are noted, bed movements are entered into the software which results in the patient moving to a position that matches the planned treatment image. Cross-sectional anatomy is included in the foundation of successfulimage matching. Acquiring and improving this skill is important to the success of the patient’s treatment as it is imperative that image matching is done in a time sensitive manner, to avoid any further patient movements. This course presents the function and application of Computed Tomography (CT) in the context of IGRT. The overarching goal is to provide students with a solid understanding of cross-sectional anatomy and its significance as it applies to IGRT.

The target audience for this course is adult learners who have chosen to work in health care. They have a minimum of two years undergraduate prerequisite courses as well as some radiation therapy course prerequisites. Information in these pre-requisite courses include how CTscanners and Linear Accelerators work, 2D- radiographic anatomy and how knowledge of the lymphatic system is applied in radiation therapy.

The learners in this type of program are usually young adults with a wide variety of lived experiences. Academically speaking, some come directly from completing the required 2 years of undergrad courses, and others with a variety of type and number of degrees. In other ways, some have not yet left the family home, some have children, some have done extensive travelling, some are changing careers. Some have worked in hospitals; some have never been inside a hospital.

Continue reading “Course Profile for Cross Sectional Anatomy for IGRT in Radiation Therapy”