The survey found broad interest in ethics/professionalism topics and revealed that these topics were being integrated into the curriculum at many institutions. The incorporation of ethics and professionalism instruction into both graduate education and postgraduate training of medical physicists, and into their subsequent lifelong continuing education is important given the nontrivial number of medical physicists who had direct personal knowledge of unethical or ethically questionable incidents in clinical practice, research, education, and professionalism.

The American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) has established a comprehensive Code of Ethics for its members. The Code is a formal part of AAPM governance, maintained as Professional Policy 24, and includes both principles of ethical practice and the rules by which a complaint will be adjudicated. The structure and content of the Code have been crafted to also serve the much broader purpose of giving practical ethical guidance to AAPM members for making sound decisions in their professional lives. The Code is structured in four major parts: a Preamble, a set of ten guiding Principles, Guidelines that elucidate the application of the Principles in various practice settings, and the formal Complaint process. Guidelines have been included to address evolving social and cultural norms, such as the use of social media and the broadening scope of considerations important in an evolving workplace. The document presented here is the first major revision of the AAPM Code of Ethics since 2008. This revision was approved by the Board of Directors to become effective 1 January 2019.

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Purpose: To evaluate the effect of using global vs local gamma analysis on planar dose IMRT QA . Methods: Seven Eclipse IMRT plans, with nine fields each, for head and neck and pelvic cancer were evaluated; planar doses from verification plans calculated on a flat phantom were compared with measurements obtained using a 2D detector array (Matrixx). An in‐house developed software was used to evaluate the measured doses using the local gamma scheme where percent dose difference is calculated relative to dose at each point, as well as the global gamma in which percent dose difference is calculated relative to the maximum dose in the measurement plane. Percent of pixels that passed (gamma >1) were compared and points that failed were investigated. Results: With 3%/3mm gamma criteria and 10% threshold dose, overall passing rate with local gamma was 4.9% (+/− 1.6%) smaller on the average than global gamma rates. Maximum difference in the passing rate was as high as 16%, with an average of 10.3% (+/−3.6%) for all fields; the variation was more pronounced for pelvic plans with simultaneous integrated boost which involved multiple planning target volumes with different prescribed doses. Points failing the local gamma criteria were mostly in lower dose (i.e., about 40–60% of maximum planar dose) and low gradient regions. Conclusions: For planar dose IMRT QA, global gamma analysis gives higher passing rates where points in lower dose and low gradient regions pass the global dose criterion with higher actual percent dose differences between measured and planned doses. Higher percent dose deviations in lower dose regions might possibly be due to deficiencies in IMRT commissioning and/or planning which could have been missed using the global gamma analysis. Users need to be aware of the limitations of the techniques used in the dosimetric analysis of IMRT plans.