What's with all the Canadian optical engineers? I worked AV for a big SPIE conference here in San Diego this week, and the bulk of what I did was a section called "The Physics of Medical Imaging". And every third presenter was Canadian. The University of Western Ontario, U. of Saskatchewan, U. of Waterloo, U. of Toronto, Anrad Corp (Canadian), Princess Margaret Hospital (in Canada), U. of Toronto/Sunnybrook (the same as U. of Toronto?)... Is our good natured, Baby-Huey-of-a-neighbor to the north trying to corner the medical imaging market? (Sorry, that should have been "neighbour".) Is this an evil Commonwealthian conspiracy? Who knows? All that's certain is nobody pronounces "mammography" like a Canadian. I also noticed that European imaging engineers -- for whom English is clearly a second language -- tend to say "micrometer" instead of "micron", and they like to emphasize things with exclamation points in Powerpoint. A German guy had a slide that said something like this:

{sigma}({delta}s/s)^2 Non-linearity matric!

I have to admit, I'm jealous of someone who gets that excited about a non-linearity matric. Also good was the Dutch guy (or maybe the same German guy) with a slide to the effect of

Gain variations from pixel to pixel caused by underfill agent -- correctable!

And this one (again, probably the same guy, or maybe one basic European with several disguises):

Slice/Channel crosstalk
[graph] [graph]
Good match between simulation and experiment!!!

Three. Excellent. It's probably good that the conference ended. I was starting to become hypnotized by the jargon. I think if I'd listened to just one more paper about phase-contrast tomography or n-i-p-SiNx / p-i-n-SiNx x-ray image detectors or amorphous selenium or detective quantum efficiency or digital fluoroscopy, I probably would have snapped and applied at the Jacobs School of Eng. I still might. I mean, if I don't perfect fast tomosynthesis for lung cancer detection using the SBDX geometry, who will? Some guy named Fahrig will. And I'll be screwed.