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Over the last years there has been a rapid growth in the number of state-of-the-art MRI scanners and MR-Linacs in radiotherapy clinics. These technological advances have made radiation therapy more precise and have improved accuracy in delineation and online image guidance. The role and responsibilities of the RTT are evolving and new educational programs are necessary using these new techniques. A survey by all RT institutes in the Netherlands has indicated there is a need for extra education for RTTs working in MR guided Radiotherapy (MRgRT). This abstract reports on the development and evaluation of a new course in MRgRT for RTTs and other specialists working with MR in RT.

This MRgRT course is developed in collaboration between the Fontys University, Amsterdam UMC, Catharina Hospital Eindhoven, Utrecht UMC and industry. RTTs, application specialists, product experts, medical physicist experts and radiation oncologists have developed modules, hands-on exercises and presentations within this course. A non-vendor specific course is provided, so RTTs using different vendors can attend and employ the obtained skills in their own department. The competencies of the course are based on Dublin descriptors. The course consists of a 10 day education and can be divided in 3 parts: 1) Pre-treatment MRI and MR physics, 2) Image registration and MR only workflows and 3) online adaptive MRgRT. The first and second part the students focus on preparation and processing assignments and the third part they focus on a practice oriented research project in collaboration with their own department. The end assessment is a written report portfolio containing all assignments and research project. Furthermore two site visits are organized to see workflows of both MR-Linac systems. A document of study load and learning objectives was compiled. The study load is 60 hours compulsory attendance at the Fontys University and 261 hours of self-study. The course was evaluated with a written survey using a 5 point Likert scale at 2 time-points during the course and by oral evaluation.

The average outcomes of the survey are presented in figure 1. Overall the course is evaluated with a score of 4.4 out of 5. The teachers were evaluated with a score of 4.9 out of 5. Not all students had good access to an MRI or MR-Linac in their department, for them it was more difficult to apply the obtained knowledge in daily practice. Moreover the starting knowledge of every student is different whereby for some participants the lessons of MR physics were scored as very difficult. The site visits were evaluated with a high score.

This course provides a perfect fit to new MRgRT developments in daily clinical practice for RTTs. An informative vendor neutral course was designed, which can be a part of the Master program of Medical Imaging and Radiation Oncology. The course was evaluated with good scores. A next step will be assessing if there is an international need for such an education program.