OpenREM future plans

[thiago...@gmail.com]

Dear all developers,

I am a medical physicist mainly working in Nuclear Medicine.

First, your program is great. It's a very neat and great software.

I was wondering regarding the compatibility of your software in future releases to nuclear medicine exams. More precisely to the injected activity. Is there anything being looked at? Would be of interest of the collaboration?

Unfortunately since this info is not in a specific DRSR it needs to be collected from elsewhere but since openREM can query the PACS this could be retrieved from the images.

Thank you for your answer.

Best wishes
Thiago

[Ed McDonagh]

Hi Thiago

Nuclear medicine related dose information is something we are interested in incorporating into OpenREM, and you can see that contributor Tim de Wit has done a lot of the work already - you can see the discussion in issue log 94 (an issue I created four years ago!). Tim's work can be seen in pull request 69 from a year ago, which demonstrates that whilst I want to see this development, I haven't made the time to prioritise reviewing the work (Sorry Tim!)

Part of the reason for this is that when I asked my Nuclear Medicine colleagues about the Radiopharmaceutical Radiation Dose Structured report (RRDSR), none of the systems they were using looked likely to start generating the report, and none of the information was held in systems that we might be able to gather the data from to insert into the database - a nuclear medicine equivalent of what we do with X-ray image data. Therefore, as we certainly haven't been short of other priorities to spend time on, this hasn't gone any further.

I am therefore intrigued by your suggestion that it could be retrieved from the images - which images, and which data is encoded into them? Which systems are you using?

I look forward to learning more.

Kind regards

Ed

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[Thiago Lima]

Hi Ed,

Thank you very much for your reply. 

This is a subject that I am very interested. 

In my view you are correct, no commercial vendor are giving a RDSR equivalent for the radiopharmaceutical information data. But, most of the information could be retrieved from the images itself (dicom headers of the images) or via a connection to the RIS where most hospitals store (some automatically other manually) the patient injection information. The nice of nuclear medicine is that since the dose comes from the injected activity, means it is only one per exam independent of the number of images. So in a query once the information is found, just need to jump to the next patient. 

About the code by Tim, in my opinion is great but it is unlikely you would get all these from one source. 

I am currently using a large number of devices (GE, Siemens and Philips for PET-CT, SPECT and SPECT-CTs) so I could help by providing (non-patient) data from all of these devices. 

Once again, thank you for the quick reply and let me know how we can push this forward =) 

Thiago

[Ed McDonagh]

Hi Thiago. If you are able to share some images with that data in that would be great. QA images are normally good for this, as long as they still have the radiopharmaceutical information in!

Send them directly to me rather than to the group preferably.

Kind regards,

Ed