RADIANCE up and running in Sweden

[lars.eg...@vgregion.se]

 

Hi all RADIANCE users,

Now RADIANCE is running in my department with the modifications and bugfixes I have done in the sources.

We have at my radiology department five CT's from GE and one SPECT/CT from Siemens (Symbia T6). The GE machines delivers RDSR's while the Symbian reports dose in an image. The department is going to evaluate which system we are going to use in the future but while I am waiting on this decision I'll let RADIANCE work. If we must purchase a commercial system we have at least got a lot of experience from RADIANCE.

The changes I have done is:

Bugfixes (mainly in ReadDoseSR):

• The ctDose.getDLPTotalFromAcquisitions() function in pixelmed returns a number with a comma instead of a dot which prevents the "CalculatedTotalDLP" string to be converted to Float. I replace the comma with a dot before converting the string into a Float.
• In masterpatient, PatientSex field was filled with Patients age. Corrected!
• The hardcoded transfer from CodeMeaning to searchStudy was replaced with some more flexible coding
• In radiance.PHP some data's from ReadDoseSR was overwritten in the database. I excluded that part in radiance.PHP.

Changes (in ReadDoseSR and radiance.PHP):

• I realised that in our department the study type is given in other tags that CodeValue and CodeMeaning. To make a flexible solution I created an extra table (modalitylookup) where I can tell which tag we should use for the study type. I wrote some coding in ReadDoseSR and radiance.PHP for that. As soon as possible we will do a "cleanup" on all the modalities to use a more "strict" coding (in CoadeValue/CodeMeaning). Then I only change in the modalitylookup table to get the new coding to work. I can still collect old data from the PACS since the old coding is valid.
• In Sweden the radiation protection authorities asks for statistics on "maximum CTDI" in an examination. I have made some code to calculate and include that in the mastertotals field.
• In Sweden we often use a national coding of examination type which occurs in the RDSR's and dose images as "Scheduled Performed Procedure Step". I have included that in the masterscanner field. However, this parameter have the same problem as the examination type in "Code Value", there can be more that one in the same study.

I have also noticed that in radiance.PHP you use "DoseLookup" number to find the conversion factor in publisheddoselookup. In ReadDoseSR you use "ExamCategory"... What are your thoughts about that, and where did you find the conversion factors for all those examination types? Maybe it is enough to look at the body part examined to find the right conversion factor. In that case I could use the Code Values/Meaning I find in the RDSR's from GE. They use the "SNOMED" codes for nine different parts of the body, e.g Head, Chest Extrimety etc.

I have installed the system on a Windows 7 computer and I let the task scheduler run the radianceliveupdate.bat every our. Once a day I run a "cleanup" file which kills all iexplore tasks running and erase the directories in "..\radiance-root\radiance\data".

I hope to get some comments from you

Sincerely:

Lars Larsson
Medical physicist