Crafting abstracts that earn a spot at the COMP annual meeting

For medical physicists, the abstract is often the smallest unit of professional currency, yet it carries the heaviest weight. It decides who gets a podium slot, who travels, and whose work gets indexed alongside the big ideas of the year. A strong abstract for the next COMP Annual Meeting does more than summarise findings; it argues, in under 300 words, that the work ahead of you is worth a delegate's Tuesday morning.

For Australians thinking of submitting, the distances involved are part of the calculation. Many fly out of Sydney, Melbourne, or Brisbane through Singapore or Hong Kong, arriving in Alberta after twenty-something hours in the air, and the trip only makes sense if the abstract is competitive. The same applies to colleagues in Perth who lose almost the entire day on the way over. Putting the time into the submission therefore pays back twice: a better chance of acceptance, and a stronger justification to put up your hand for funding from your state department or the NHMRC.

The good news is that a well-written abstract follows a recognisable shape. The sections below walk through how to find your angle, anchor it to the meeting's theme, and polish the language so the science lands cleanly. Along the way, there are notes on everything from author lists to revision etiquette, drawn from what reviewers tend to reward.

Lead with the gap you saw

Every accepted abstract opens with a problem worth solving. Reviewers skim quickly, often between flights or over a flat white at a Canberra café, so the first sentence has to name the gap in plain language. Avoid broad phrases such as "radiotherapy is important" or "imaging has advanced rapidly". Name the specific question you set out to answer, the population you studied, or the technique you wanted to test. A line like "Small-field output factors for FFF beams on a new linac platform remain under-reported" gives a reviewer something to grab.

If your work came out of a department like the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, the Royal Brisbane and Women's, or the Crown Princess Mary Cancer Centre in Sydney, drop that context in early. Australian reviewers, in particular, appreciate knowing whether the cohort came from a public radiation oncology network or a private provider, because it affects how the findings translate. The opening should make the reader think: that gap matters to me, and these authors have the data to close it.

Anchor your work to the conference theme

The Scientific Committee quietly favours abstracts that connect to the year's theme. Read the call for papers carefully and look for repeated phrases, then mirror that vocabulary in your title and aim statement. If the program emphasises adaptive therapy, brachytherapy, or AI in imaging, signal that alignment without forcing it. Forced connections are obvious and tend to backfire during review.

It is worth scanning the past few years of accepted abstracts on the COMP website to see how the conversation has shifted. Themes in dosimetry, for instance, have moved from basic small-field measurements to MR-guided and adaptive workflows over the last decade. A useful starting point is the dosimetry abstract review, which gives a snapshot of how successful submissions in that stream were framed and what kinds of results they led with.

The shape of a strong methods and results block

Once the gap is set, the methods need to be specific enough that a peer can repeat the work, but compact enough to fit. Mention the equipment, the protocol, the sample size, and any deviations from standard practice. If you used an in-house script or a particular phantom, name it. Saying "data were analysed in MATLAB" is fine; saying "data were processed" is not.

Results belong in numbers, not adjectives. Report the central value, the spread, and the comparison, even if the difference did not reach significance. Reviewers are far more comfortable recommending a paper that says "the geometric mean ratio was 1.03 (95% CI 1.01 to 1.05)" than one that says "results showed good agreement". For Australian readers especially, where state-based cancer services often produce similar datasets, a clear numerical comparison is what lifts a poster from acceptable to recommended.

Titles, author lists, and visual aids

The title is the abstract's handshake. Keep it declarative, free of colons stacked on colons, and under about fifteen words. Save creative phrasing for the poster itself. Author lists should reflect actual contribution; if you are submitting from a teaching hospital with registrars and Honours students, include the people who genuinely shaped the work, in the order they shaped it. Reviewers notice inflated author lists and tend to discount them.

Figures and tables are usually not part of the abstract submission itself, but a single visual is sometimes allowed for late-breaking work. If you get the option, choose a figure that shows the central result, not the prettiest one. A plot of measured versus predicted dose, a calibration curve, or a ROC plot will always beat a workflow diagram.

Plain language, polished sentences

Medical physics writing in Australia has its own rhythm, partly shaped by our distance from the major English-language journals and partly by the pace of clinical life. Sentences often come out longer and more hedged than they need to. Trim them. Replace "it is well known that" with nothing. Replace "in order to" with "to". If a sentence has more than one bracket, break it.

Read the abstract aloud before submitting. Anything that makes you stumble will make a reviewer stumble too. Spell out abbreviations on first use, even obvious ones like OAR, and check that your units follow SI throughout. A quick second pair of eyes from a colleague in Adelaide or Perth, ideally someone outside your subfield, catches more than any spellchecker will.

Submitting, revising, and travelling to present

Once you click submit, set yourself up for the next stage. Track the reviewer comments when they arrive, treat them as a free pre-review from experts in your area, and respond point by point in any resubmission. If your abstract is accepted as a poster rather than a talk, do not treat that as a rejection. Posters at COMP often generate the most detailed feedback because the conversation happens face to face.

Plan the travel early, especially if you are based in Australia and not used to crossing to North America. Reading the Banff travel tips ahead of time covers the practical side of arriving in the Canadian Rockies, from layered clothing to the local shuttles. The people you meet over the first drink are often the ones who read your paper six months later, so build in time to actually enjoy the conference.

Submit your best work, sharpen the prose one more time, and send it in. The next COMP Annual Meeting is a chance to put Australian medical physics on the program, and a clean, confident abstract is the cleanest way to get there. Once you have arrived, the reception guide is a useful prompt to actually go along and meet the people whose papers you have been citing.