Medical physics and medicine

[|mathematix|]

Do doctors (people who did medicine at university, be it MBBS or MD) get to collaborate with medical physicists and medical engineers to design, research and develop medical equipment and machines? Or is this the job of medical scientists and doctors only get to use the equipment?

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

The term "doctor" is extremely ambiguous. More times than not medical scientists are doctors. Are you asking if general practitioners (family medical doctors) play important roles in medical device development, i'd guess not very much. It's like asking if an auto shop mechanic plays an important role in designing a new engine.

 

[mazinse]

in the US, medical physicists are only for treatment, they don't design the equipments, the engineers do, which they don't really need to collaborate because the doctors arent the ones using the equipments, the technicians do.

 

[daveb]

I beg to differ. At my company we have had to collaborate with both radiation oncologists in order to design a treatment planning system but also medical physicists and technicians in order to design a user friendly and streamlined workflow. In addition, we have 3 medical physicists on staff to help with designing QA tools necessary for performing quality assurance on the device (FYI, our device is a real time MRI for IGRT). Granted, the majority of work is done by the engineers, but there is room for doctors and MPs (several sit on both our Clinical Advisory Board and Scientific Advisory Board - our founder is an AMP).