ESTRO 2024 - Abstract Book

S2701

Interdisciplinary - Education in radiation therapy

ESTRO 2024

Despite the growing interest in oncology, the field of radiation oncology in Italy is not adequately represented. Many students may be unaware of radiation oncology as a potential career path and the important role it plays in cancer treatment. Others are intimidated by the complexity of the discipline and required knowledge of radiological anatomy. All that leads to training programs missing out on recruiting potential candidates. This study aims to examine students' perception of the radiation oncology specialty before and after completing a clerkship program at our institution.

Material/Methods:

From 08/05/2023 to 18/09/2023, seven groups of fourth-year medical students have participated in a 5-day training program at the European Institute of Oncology. The program involved spending 5 hours daily in the radiation oncology department, where the students have received an orientation session, tour the facility, and gained clinical experience alongside staff radiation oncologists and residents. During the program, the students have also engaged in the contouring lab (Figure 1), learning about organ segmentation in radiation oncology. They performed the contouring task twice: once at the start of the program and again after an introductory lecture on organ segmentation.

Participants have completed two questionnaires: one after each of the two contouring tasks. At the end of the program, the accuracy of their contours has been evaluated by comparing them to a reference contour. The questionnaires aimed to gather information about the students' demographics, their initial perception of the difficulty of segmentation tasks, the adequacy of their anatomical and radiological knowledge, and their interest in pursuing radiation oncology as a future career.

Results:

As per the program 22 students have participated in the contouring workshop and completed the two questionnaires. Among them, 16 students were aged between 20-25, 2 students were between 26-30, and 4 students were between 31-35.

The interactive contouring activities received overall high satisfaction, with a median score of 4. Noticeably, even though the majority of the students viewed their anatomical background as adequate to identify the structures