Monday, February 25, 2019

A picture of IEC Table rotations

I have always struggled with a mental picture to help understand how rotation directions work in IEC table coordinates.  As we were looking in to support for decubitus, it occurred to me that rotation directions could be understood in terms of the relationship between orientations that were separated by 90 degrees.

For instance, HFS > HFDL > HFP > HFDR are all related by a 90 degree table roll / transverse rotation, and that the direction corresponds to a positive rotation (clockwise when viewed from the foot of the table).  Likewise, HFS > FFS and HFP > FFP can be viewed as resulting from two 90 degree rotations, with an intermediate stop at a rotation that isn't typically used for treatment (but does generally correspond to stereotactive treatment mode on advanced linacs).

So I assembled this in to a single chart, that I have been checking over to see if it still makes sense:

Onnx