Physica Medica: European Journal of Medical Physics provides an international forum for research and reviews of the following main topics:

• Medical Imaging
• Radiation Therapy
• Radiation Protection
• Measuring Systems and Signal Processing
• Education and training in Medical Physics

The Journal is published by Elsevier on behalf of Associazione Italiana di Fisica Medica and the European Federation of Organisations for Medical Physics.These guidelines generally follow the "Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals" The complete document appears at http://www.icmje.org

Manuscripts should be submitted online at http://ees.elsevier.com/ejmp and the instructions on the site should be closely followed. Authors may submit their manuscript and track their progress to final decision. Reviewers can download manuscripts and submit their report to the editor. All manuscripts are peer reviewed.

Submission of an article implies that the work described has not been published previously (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture or academic thesis), that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that its publication is approved by all authors and tacitly or explicitly by the responsible authorities where the work was carried out, and that, if accepted, it will not be published elsewhere in the same form, in English or in any other language, without the written consent of the copyright-holder.

Editorial Policies:

Authorship

All authors should have made substantial contributions to all of the following: (1) the conception and design of the study, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data, (2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content, (3) final approval of the version to be submitted.

Acknowledgements

All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship as defined above should be listed in an acknowledgements section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, writing assistance, or a department chair who provided only general support. Authors should disclose whether they had any writing assistance and identify the entity that paid for this assistance.

Changes to authorship

This policy concerns the addition, deletion, or rearrangement of author names in the authorship of accepted manuscripts:

Before the accepted manuscript is published in an online issue: Requests to add or remove an author, or to rearrange the author names, must be sent to the Journal Manager from the corresponding author of the accepted manuscript and must include: (a) the reason the name should be added or removed, or the author names rearranged and (b) written confirmation (e-mail, fax, letter) from all authors that they agree with the addition, removal or rearrangement. In the case of addition or removal of authors, this includes confirmation from the author being added or removed. Requests that are not sent by the corresponding author will be forwarded by the Journal Manager to the corresponding author, who must follow the procedure as described above. Note that: (1) Journal Managers will inform the Journal Editors of any such requests and (2) publication of the accepted manuscript in an online issue is suspended until authorship has been agreed.

After the accepted manuscript is published in an online issue: Any requests to add, delete, or rearrange author names in an article published in an online issue will follow the same policies as noted above and result in a corrigendum.

Submission of Articles

All manuscripts should be written in English. Either American or British spelling is acceptable, but the form used must be consistent throughout the article. Authors whose native language is not English are encouraged to have their submission checked for spelling and grammar prior to submission.

The title page should contain the author name(s) and affiliation(s). The name of the author will be listed according to this pattern; given name (or names), which will be always initialized, followed by the family name. Please be sure of using this convention in the submitted paper.

An abstract must always be included as a separated document. The abstract should be no longer than 250 words. At the end of the abstract, key words (not more than four) must be included to be used for indexing and bibliography searching. The paper should be subdivided into sections; typically: Introduction; Theoretical Background (if applicable); Material and Methods; Results; Discussion; Conclusions; Acknowledgments (if applicable); References; Appendix (if applicable). Sections, subsections and sub-subsections are numbered in Arabic. Major headings should be typed in bold face; sub-headings in italic; sub-subheadings in uppercase letters and underlined. Use double spacing after headings and subheadings. No paragraph after sub-headings. List of items may be laid with each item marked by a dot, or numbered with lowercase Roman numerals or listed with lowercase Roman letters as in example below:

item one
item two

or

i) item one
ii) item two

or

a) item one
b) item two

Displayed equations should be numbered consecutively in Arabic, with the number set flush right and enclosed in parentheses.

Word limits

• full length article - 8,000 words
• review article - 14,000 words
• technical note - 3,000 words

Longer submissions will be considered at the discretion of the Editor-in-Chief.

References should be referred to in the text with progressive Arabic numerals in brackets, and listed at the end of the text in order of mention. Examples are given below:

[1] Purcell EM, Torrey HC, Pound RV. Resonance absorption by nuclear magnetic moments in a solid. Phys Rev 1946: 69; 37-9. [2] Budinger TF, Gullberg GT. Transverse section reconstruction of gamma ray emitting radionuclides in patients. In: Reconstruction Tomography in Diagnostic Radiology in Nuclear Medicine. Ter Pogossian M. Ed. Baltimore. University Park Press 1977; 315-42. [3] Rice-Evans P. Spark, Streamer, Proportional and Drift Chambers. London. Richelier Press 1974.

Tables to be typed on separate sheets and numbered in order of mention with Roman numerals. All tables should be referred to in the text. A caption should be included.

Illustrations to be numbered serially with Arabic numbers. All figures should be referred to in the text. Captions should be typed on a separate sheet. A detailed guide on electronic artwork is available at Artwork guidelines Artwork must be designed to fit either a single column (84mm wide) or the full text width of the page (175mm). Similar images should be consistent in size. Images should be tightly cropped. Lettering used in the artwork must be consistent in size (7-10pt) and font (use Arial, Courier, Helvetica, Times or Symbol). Figures may be reduced in size for publication. Mark the appropriate position of a figure in the article. Number illustrations consecutively in the order in which they are referred to in the text, and provide a caption for each figure. Please note: Because of technical complications which can arise by converting colour figures to greyscale, please submit both black and white prints corresponding to all colour illustrations. Colour artwork will be published online.

Electronic Submission of Artwork

• Files must be in the correct format: preferably TIFF, EPS or MS Office.
• Images should be captured at the following minimum resolutions: halftones and colour (all colour must be RGB) 300 dpi; combination halftones 500 dpi; line art 1000-1200 dpi.
• Annotations to the figure, such as arrows and labels should be embedded in the electronic file.
• File names should be self-explanatory with file extension included, e.g. use filename "fig1.tif" for Figure 1 in TIFF format.
• All illustrations to be provided as separate files.

Conflict of interest

At the end of the text, under a subheading "Conflict of interest statement" all authors must disclose any financial and personal relationships with other people or organisations that could inappropriately influence (bias) their work. Examples of potential conflicts of interest include employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patent applications/registrations, and grants or other funding.

Role of the funding source

All sources of funding should be declared as an acknowledgement at the end of the text. Authors should declare the role of study sponsors, if any, in the study design, in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript; and in the decision to submit the manuscript for publication. If the study sponsors had no such involvement, the authors should so state.

Randomised controlled trials

All randomised controlled trials submitted for publication in Physica Medica should include a completed Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) flow chart. Please refer to the CONSORT statement website at http://www.consort-statement.org for more information. Physica Medica has adopted the proposal from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) which require, as a condition of consideration for publication of clinical trials, registration in a public trials registry. Trials must register at or before the onset of patient enrolment. The clinical trial registration number should be included at the end of the abstract of the article. For this purpose, a clinical trial is defined as any research project that prospectively assigns human subjects to intervention or comparison groups to study the cause-and-effect relationship between a medical intervention and a health outcome. Studies designed for other purposes, such as to study pharmacokinetics or major toxicity (e.g. phase I trials) would be exempt. Further information can be found at http://www.icmje.org.

Ethics

Work on human beings that is submitted to Physica Medica should comply with the principles laid down in the Declaration of Helsinki; Recommendations guiding physicians in biomedical research involving human subjects. Adopted by the 18th World Medical Assembly, Helsinki, Finland, June 1964, amended by the 29th World Medical Assembly, Tokyo, Japan, October 1975, the 35th World Medical Assembly, Venice, Italy, October 1983, and the 41st World Medical Assembly, Hong Kong, September 1989. The manuscript should contain a statement that the work has been approved by the appropriate ethical committees related to the institution(s) in which it was performed and that subjects gave informed consent to the work. Studies involving experiments with animals must state that their care was in accordance with institution guidelines. Patients' and volunteers' names, initials, and hospital numbers should not be used.

Patient Consent

Studies on patients or volunteers require ethics committee approval and informed consent which should be documented in your paper.

Patients have a right to privacy. Therefore identifying information, including patients¿ images, names, initials, or hospital numbers, should not be included in videos, recordings, written descriptions, photographs, and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and you have obtained written informed consent for publication in print and electronic form from the patient (or parent, guardian or next of kin where applicable). If such consent is made subject to any conditions, Elsevier must be made aware of all such conditions. Written consents must be provided to Elsevier on request.

Even where consent has been given, identifying details should be omitted if they are not essential. If identifying characteristics are altered to protect anonymity, such as in genetic pedigrees, authors should provide assurance that alterations do not distort scientific meaning and editors should so note.

If such consent has not been obtained, personal details of patients included in any part of the paper and in any supplementary materials (including all illustrations and videos) must be removed before submission

Copyright

Upon acceptance of an article, authors will be asked to sign a Journal Publishing Agreement (for more information on this and copyright see copyright information.
Acceptance of the agreement will ensure the widest possible dissemination of information. An e-mail (or letter) will be sent to the corresponding author confirming receipt of the manuscript together with a `Journal Publishing Agreement form.If excerpts from other copyrighted works are included, the author(s) must obtain written permission from the copyright owners and credit the source(s) in the article. Elsevier has preprinted forms for use by authors in these cases : contact Elsevier's Rights Department, Philadelphia, PA, USA: Tel. (+1) 215 238 7869; Fax (+1) 215 238 2239; e-mail healthpermissions@elsevier.com . Requests may also be completed online via the Elsevier homepage (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/permissions).

Special Subject Repositories Certain repositories such as PubMed Central ("PMC") are authorized under special arrangement with Elsevier to process and post certain articles. The following agreements have been established for authors whose articles have been accepted for publication in an Elsevier journal and whose underlying research is supported by one of the following funding bodies:

• National Institutes of Health.

• The Wellcome Trust

Proofs
One set of page proofs in PDF format will be sent by e-mail to the corresponding author (if we do not have an e-mail address then paper proofs will be sent by post). Elsevier now sends PDF proofs which can be annotated; for this you will need to download Adobe Reader version 7 available free from http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html. Instructions on how to annotate PDF files will accompany the proofs. The exact system requirements are given at the Adobe site: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/acrrsystemreqs.html#70win.If you do not wish to use the PDF annotations function, you may list the corrections (including replies to the Query Form) and return to Elsevier in an e-mail. Please list your corrections quoting line number. If, for any reason, this is not possible, then mark the corrections and any other comments (including replies to the Query Form) on a printout of your proof and return by fax, or scan the pages and e-mail, or by post.Please use this proof only for checking the typesetting, editing, completeness and correctness of the text, tables and figures. Significant changes to the article as accepted for publication will only be considered at this stage with permission from the Editor. We will do everything possible to get your article published quickly and accurately. Therefore, it is important to ensure that all of your corrections are sent back to us in one communication: please check carefully before replying, as inclusion of any subsequent corrections cannot be guaranteed. Proofreading is solely your responsibility. Note that Elsevier may proceed with the publication of your article if no response is received.

Offprints
The corresponding author, at no cost, will be provided with a PDF file of the article.The PDF file is a watermarked version of the published article and includes a cover sheet with the journal cover image and a disclaimer outlining the terms and conditions of use.