Japan Society of Medical Physics (JSMP) was first founded on 1961 March as a sub-organization of Japan Radiological Society (JRS) and became an independent society in 2000. The history of the Society could be divided five periods: 1) Pre-historical period (–1961), 2) Establishment period (1961–1970), 3) Development period (1970–1980), 4) Stable period (1980–2000), and 5) Second development period (2000–present).
In the 1st period, several physicists carried out individually research or practice in medical institution until the Society was established. In the second period, the Society established to hold scientific meetings twice a year, one in the spring as a part of JRS annual meeting, while the other in the autumn as an independent meeting.
In the 3rd period, owing to development of radiological equipment such as CT and extension of computer utilization, the Society had rapidly grown up from approximately 200 members to 700. However, since 1980 the number of memberships was almost steady for two decades. During the 4th period, JRS started to certify medical physicists with the help of our society in 1987, and World Congress on Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering was held in Kyoto (1991).
The 5th period began with independence of the Society from JRS in 2000. Since then the number of memberships has been growing rapidly to approximately 1800. There are several reasons for rapid growth in the last decade. One reason is that importance of medical physics has been recognized with the several radiotherapy accidents due to lack of QA, which occurred around 2000.
JSMP now organizes Japanese Board of Medical Physics Certification (JBMP) with JRS, and JBMP certifies medical physicist. JSMP publishes Japanese Journal of Medical Physics (JJMP) four times a year. Because JJMP is published mainly in Japanese, JSMP publishes Radiological Physics and Technology (RPT) in English with Japanese Society of Radiological Technology (JSRT) twice a year.

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Recently, Japan has constructed the largest number of proton and heavy ion therapy facilities in the world. They have produced fruitful results, and now the particle therapy attracts an great attention. The author could fortunately have the opportunity to involve in the research and development of the particle therapy facilities, from the beginning of the entering into National Institute of Radiological Sciences. I started from the investigation of a thermal neutron capture therapy at first, and have been concerned with the development of the facilities for the fast neutron therapy, the proton therapy, and the present heavy ion therapy. Based on these experiences, I would like to review on the history of the particle therapy in Japan and on the latest developments.

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Various efforts have been accomplished to unify absorbed doses administered by the radiation therapy in our country. We comment on the historic process about these and the present conditions, the future. Assurance of the quality becomes important while management is heightened by the radiation therapy and gets possible to offer more good treatment. The establishment and traceability of the national dose standards and the reasonable use of the experiment are necessary to secure quality. We are showed by the situation of the national standard preparations, the outside investigation that is necessary for the quality assurance of the absorbed dose, and the radiation therapy of the traceability to the treatment enforcement institution.

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Image processing techniques including pattern recognition techniques play important roles in high precision diagnosis and radiation therapy. The author reviews a symposium on medical image information, which was held in the 100th Memorial Annual Meeting of the Japan Society of Medical Physics from September 23rd to 25th.In this symposium, we had three invited speakers, Dr. Akinobu Shimizu, Dr. Hideaki Haneishi, and Dr. Hirohito Mekata, who are active engineering researchers of segmentation, image registration, and pattern recognition, respectively.  In this paper, the author reviews the roles of the medical imaging processing in medical physics field, and the talks of the three invited speakers.

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The purpose of this study was to develop a method for automated estimation of the tumor location in cine images on an electronic portal imaging device (EPID) without using implanted markers during lung stereotactic radiotherapy (SRT). First, the irradiation field images were determined by analyzing the histogram and cropped from all EPID cine images. Second, a tumor region in the reference image of the EPID cine images was enhanced by using a Gaussian image enhancement filter (GIEF), and then it was used as a “tumor template” image segmented based on a multiple-gray level thresholding technique and a region growing technique. Finally, the tumor location was determined by the position in which the tumor template image took the maximum cross-correlation value within each irradiation field image following the reference image. EPID images with 512×384 pixels (pixel size: 0.56 mm) were acquired at energies of 4 or 6 MV on linear accelerators. The proposed method was applied to EPID cine images (228 frames) of 13 clinical cases with a non-small cell lung cancer. As a result, the average location error was 1.63±0.62 mm. This examination result suggested that physiological motion of tumor can be monitored by using the proposed method during radiotherapy without implanted markers.

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