Status Moving Forward

[Cody Crewson]

Hello everyone

I'm the Saskatchewan Cancer Agency's Saskatoon QATrack+ admin. I've been thinking about Randle's announcement, doing some research, and talking with the few other contacts I currently have. 

I would like to propose that I take over the role of Project Coordinator and Source Administrator. This would allow the project to return to active status. To this end I have

• Created a new contact email to be shared amongst myself and any future admins that might wish to come aboard. (med...@crcrewso.ca)
• Created a new GitHub project (Modernization Link) to track the work needed to be done to bring the code to supported versions of the base tools
• Started to research how Open Source projects can be coordinated. 
  

The next steps for me are:

• Getting a list of active clinics
• Start conversations with users about their current limitations and new features needed. 
• Create a formal communications strategy between users. Do we want to continue to use Google Groups as it starts to sunset? Use the QATrack GitHub page's Discussion Board? Reddit? Email.
• Fix the default database so that it supports new features 
• Update the documentation to better support Users, Administrators, non-technical Hospital Administrators, etc. 

I also have some wild ideas I would like to pursue that are tangentially related:

• Improve PyBeam-QA installation, documentation, and usability to allow it to become the default parallel analysis tool for users to investigate why image based tests might be failing
• Create a singe repository for sample QA imaging data to be used by clinics to develop QATrack+ implementations without also needing to figure out how the site wants to collect the data. 
  • Real images of standard tests that are clear passes
  • Real images that are edge cases, near tolerance, common defects, etc. 
  • Ideal image sets 
• Use the sample data to create regression test suites
• Support long requested features, like better handling of calibration factors. 

I'm looking forward to seeing this community's thoughts. 

Cody 

[Ash Cullen]

Hi Cody,

I think it would be fantastic for QATrack+ to continue as an open-source project. 

While I'm now a RadMachine user and so am unlikely to personally contribute, I would love for the project to thrive as I still have a soft spot for it having implemented it at two centres.

I agree the list of clinics that use it on Randy's qatrackplus.com site is probably outdated in that many clinics have probably transitioned to RadMachine. I'm sure those could be replaced with many new clinics that are actually using QATrack+.

I would propose prioritising the relevance of QCPump as a vital extension of QATrack+ and perhaps extending its functionality. At the very least, ensuring MPC import compatibility with the latest linac version. As an example, I know in the current release there is an issue where MPC kVSCheck (a test that can only be performed with a Varian HASP key in TrueBeam v3.0+) will break the RegEx match code as it's an unexpected input. I did have a very rough hardcoded workaround prior to our RadMachine, but this could be done much more elegantly (and properly!). There is also the issue of PeerSync on TB v4.X no longer exporting the results.csv and now exporting just the results.xml, which would entirely break QCPump's MPC pump. With suitable parsing, QCPump could support this.

Regards,

Ash

[tbe...@gmail.com]

Hi Cody,

It would be nice if QATrack would get active again. While having new features certainly would be cool, having the option to switch to radmachine with it's improved pylinac version is probably a thing not only for our clinic.

If there are braking changes to the database that would prevent a future switch to radmachine it should be made clear in the release note.

regards

Thomas

[James Murphy (Royal Cornwall Hospital)]

Hi

Great news Cody.

 

As I have mentioned to Cody I have been working on modernizing QATrack+, I currently have a fork here https://github.com/bobred/qatrackplus running on Django 4.3 and Python 3.13.

I have performed some basic tests an all looks good apart from the create new service event, part of the page is not rendering.

I am running through the unit tests and tying to up any issues as I find them, so far these are just small datetime issues.

What are the issues with using the original pylinac in QATrack?

regards

James

[Randle Taylor]

Hi All,

Just wanted to drop a note saying that the branch "3.2.0" was the branch I was mostly working on before things stalled so it's probably worth incorporating that into your efforts.

Randy

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[James Murphy (Royal Cornwall Hospital)]

Hi Randy

Great, I'll take a look.

James

[Cody Crewson]

James

My site currently is using PyLinac 3.19 on our QATrack+ server. Using versions newer then that are going to become problematic until there's an upgrade path to Django 4+ due to a mismatch between python version requirements. Up until this point I've just used pip to manually remove the out of tree version of PyLinac and replace it with the version my site has validated against our tests. 

[James Murphy (Royal Cornwall Hospital)]

Hi Cody,

Fine, I've always used the most recent version of pylinac, not used pylinac-qatrackplus.

James

[Cody Crewson]

I've created a survey to get a better idea of what the current user base is like. If you have the time could you please submit a reply within the next two weeks?

https://forms.gle/GJwRYyktS3RGvSWu9

[alanphys]

Hi Cody

Not wishing to detract from the excellent work Kagiso has done, but will you also please consider aligning with LinaQA. If there is anything that is not making it suitable please let me know or create an issue. I know installation is a problem at the moment, but when I get time to work on it it changes on almost a daily basis. As soon as I have something that I think is approaching the final form I'll create an installation package.

Regards

Alan

[Schroedingers_cat]

Hello @all,

we were able to installe the pylinac version 3.23.2 on a windows server 2022.
We also tried versions above it, but we have issues with the python dependencies.

We also filled out the form, thanks to Cody.

Looking forward to the future developements!

[Cody Crewson]

Alan

I've added the project to my 'to be reviewed' list. I should be reaching out with some project specific questions before the start of summer. Thank you for bringing your hard work to the group's attention!!!

[Cody Crewson]

Group update:

I've so far received 34 responses to the survey. Thank you all! The response has been much bigger than I had thought it would be. 

A couple of things I've already noticed are that there are clinics from Germany and Spain using it. If there were the tools would there be any interest in adding some level of language localization to the interface? Anyone interested in helping provide some translation assistance? 

There are quite a few more of you who have some level of resourcing to share. I will be reaching out in the next few weeks. 

It seems like people are preferring Google Groups or GitHub, so nothing will change for the next while. Google is definitely making me question the long term viability of Google groups, but I don't think anything is going to radically change in the next 2 years. 

[onid...@gmail.com]

I can help with translations into Spanish!

Claudia