Applied Computing and Informatics xxx (2018) xxx–xxx

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Applied Computing and Informatics

RadioPharmaDose, a Java-based open-source software for estimating

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: In this work, a user-friendly Java-based open-source software has been developed for internal radiation
Received 25 March 2018 dosimetry. Based on values published by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP),
Revised 3 June 2018 the software calculates the estimated absorbed dose for each organ and also the estimated effective dose,
Accepted 4 June 2018
this for about forty of the most known radioactive drugs. In addition, the present software offers many
Available online xxxx
features which include: 1) a very friendly graphical user-interface (GUI) designed to facilitate the process
of selecting mandatory input data such as radiopharmaceutical product, administered activity and
Keywords:
patient’s data, 2) a tool for generating a medical report, which can be exported as PDF file or printed
Dosimetry
Radiopharmaceutical
directly and then incorporated into the patient’s record, 3) a SQLite database for storing patient’s specific
Nuclear medicine and dosimetric data. We believe that the present software can be a useful tool for nuclear medicine
Open-source workers. It is freely available for download on GitHub (https://github.com/EL-Bakkali-Jaafar/
Java RadioPharmaDose).
Ó 2018 The Authors. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an
open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

1. Introduction This software allows one to create a dosimetric report for injected
patient, which can be saved as a PDF file then printed on paper.
As is well-known, a radiopharmaceutical product is typically a
radioactive drug used clinically either in diagnostics use or in ther-
apeutic use and typical quantities given are chosen to provide ade- 2. Related works
quate medical image quality while maintaining radiation doses to
reasonable levels. Today, in many nuclear medicine services For many years, some useful software have been developed
around the world, workers ask for an open-source software that with the aim to facilitate calculations of dosimetric data of patients
estimating and reporting internal radiation dosimetry which can following radiopharmaceutical administrations namely: MIRDOSE
be added to the patient’s medical records. This work offers a such [1], RADAR [2] and OLINDA/EXM [3]. Recently, DOSEFX [4] soft-
solution; it is about an open-source Java-based software and can be ware has been developed for internal dosimetry and it calculates
run on multiple platforms, which thanks to its friendly graphical internal organ and tumor doses during clinical radiopharmaceuti-
user interface the calculation of dosimetric data with respect of cal administrations. However, these software cannot be widely
the patient’s specific (name, age, etc.) and dosimetric data used in nuclear medicine services around the world because they
(radiopharmaceutical drug, injected activity, etc.) is made easy. require users to purchase official license. Recently, a freeware
called Dosisrad [5] has been well-developed in Visual Basic lan-
guage which allows dosimetric calculations of more than 70 radio-
pharmaceutical drugs and provides a tool to generate a dosimetry
⇑ Corresponding author at: Nuclear Medicine Department, Military Hospital report that contains dosimetric data of a given patient adminis-
Mohammed V, Rabat, Morocco. tered by a given radiopharmaceutical product which can be
E-mail address: [email protected] (J.EL Bakkali).
included in a patient’s medical record. However, this software
Peer review under responsibility of King Saud University.
has some limitations. Firstly, the software is a freeware, unlike
open-source software, the code source isn’t accessible by other
external developers which may restrict its improvement. Secondly,
it can be run only on Windows operating system, starting this soft-
Production and hosting by Elsevier
ware in a Linux system has shown some problems in running in the

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aci.2018.06.001
2210-8327/Ó 2018 The Authors. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Please cite this article in press as: J.E. Bakkali et al., Applied Computing and Informatics (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aci.2018.06.001
2 J.EL Bakkali et al. / Applied Computing and Informatics xxx (2018) xxx–xxx

case of an implementation of Windows on Unix such as Wine soft- component and also for displaying the estimated effective dose in a
ware. Thirdly, the software doesn’t allow one to store patient’s data text field.
in a database for its next use or analysis. RegistredPatientsSqliteDB.java: singleton class that contains a set
of setter and getter methods needed for creating, editing and
3. Software architecture selecting elements from the database that stores a patient’s speci-
fic and dosimetric data.
The source code of RadioPharmaDose software was written PatientsDBTable.java: class extended from Jframe Java base class
and uses data provided by previous class for displaying data (name,
using Java programming language. The reason why we have chosen
to create a Java-based application is due to the fact that Java pro- exam id, record date, effective dose, etc.) related to each patient in
a GUI table component.
vides a very rich and powerful API producing the most portable
and flexible application which can be run on various platforms
such as Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. The GUI application 3.2. External jar libraries
described in this paper was developed under NetBeans IDE and
uses some external open-source libraries. Thus, the code source itext-1.3.jar: iText [6] is a powerful open-source Java library for
is divided into three major parts: creating and manipulating PDF file, it is integrated into our open-
source software and it is used for exporting medical report in a
3.1. Java sources PDF format and also it is used for handling the print process of this
PDF file.
RadioPharmaDoseMainWindow.java: main window of Radio- Jtattoo-1.6.11.jar: Jtattoo [7] is an open-source Java library offer-
PharmaDose Java-based GUI application. ing several different Look and Feels for Swing applications, it is
RegistredPatientsData.java: singleton class contains a number of used in our open-source software for setting the look and the feel
setter and getter methods used for recording patient’s data. of all GUI components.sqlitejdbc-v056.jar: SQLite JDBC [8] is a Java
DoseToOrganData.java: class contains methods to estimate library for accessing and creating SQLite database files in Java. It is
absorbed dose per organ and effective dose. This class has some used in our open-source application as default database.
methods used to access ASCII files that contain ICRP dosimetric
data. 3.3. ASCII text files
DoseTable.java: class inherited from Jframe and has methods to
access to data provided by the previous class needed for displaying About forty ASCII text files having a filename extension of ‘‘.rfm”
estimated absorbed dose for each organ in a two columns GUI table are located in the radiopharmaceutical_data sub-directory, each

Fig. 1. Window for entering the required input data.

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 J.EL Bakkali et al. / Applied Computing and Informatics xxx (2018) xxx–xxx 3

file identifies a radiopharmaceutical product and contains numer- flexible way, thanks to a number of GUI components which allow
ical dosimetric data which are based on kinetics models and are one to quickly select a radioisotope, a radiopharmaceutical drug
obtained from tables of absorbed dose per unit of administered which is made from, the administered activity either in megabec-
activity published by ICRP in the 80 [9] and 106 [10] publications. querel (MBq) or millicurie (mCi) and the patient age. After clicking
These dosimetric data containing the estimated organ absorbed on ‘‘Calculation” button, specific normalized dosimetric data (given
doses (given as mGy/MBq) and the estimated effective dose (given as mSv/MBq or mGy/MBq) are loaded from an ASCII text file having
as mSv/MBq), which have been calculated by taking into account a filename extension of ‘‘.rfm” and having a name of a selected
patient’s age. Indeed, the calculation of absorbed doses has been radiopharmaceutical drug, the required calculations consist of
performed for adults, child of 15-year-old, 10-year-old, 5-year- multiplying of each normalized dosimetric data by the adminis-
old, and 1-year-old. tered activity value, so the estimated absorbed dose for each organ
and the estimated effective dose according to the injected activity
are calculated. Fig. 2 shows a screenshot of second tab component
4. Main capabilities and features used to handle radiopharmaceutical dose calculation.
The presented software supports dosimetric calculations of
As is well-known, a GUI interface may reduce the time required about forty of the most known radioactive drugs, the concerned
to enter data thanks to the adequate well-developed graphical dosimetric data that include normalized effective dose and
components. With this purpose, by using concerned Java APIs we normalized absorbed dose per organ were obtained from ICRP
have developed this open-source software from scratch by using publications 80 [8] and 106 [9].
Netbeans IDE. The overall view of the main window of this soft- Reverting to the description of the present software, by clicking
ware is supported by a tab-based component that contains in total on ‘‘Show Table” button, a GUI table is displayed as we can see in
three tabs namely: ‘‘Patients Registration”, ‘‘Radiopharmaceutical Fig. 3 and the concerned window contains a table component
dose calculation” and ‘‘Medical Report”. The first tab is dedicated which displaying a list of organs sorted alphabetically, including
to new patient’s registration. Fig. 1 shows the concerned window adrenals, bladder, bone surfaces, brain, breast, gall bladder, stom-
that incorporates GUI components for recording hospital data ach, small Intestine, colon, upper large intestine, lower large intes-
(hospital name, exam id), patient data (patient name, patient age, tine, heart, kidneys, liver, lungs, muscles, esophagus, ovaries,
patient weight, patient height) and doctor data (indication and pancreas, Red marrow, skin, spleen, testes, thymus, thyroid and
comment). uterus. The organs which are not listed here are assumed as
Regarding second tab, the calculation of dosimetric data related ‘‘Remaining organs” and the estimated effective dose is presented
to a given radiopharmaceutical drugs are made in an easy and below the table component in a text field component.

Fig. 2. Window for selecting a radioactive drug and calculate absorbed doses for each organ and effective dose.

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4 J.EL Bakkali et al. / Applied Computing and Informatics xxx (2018) xxx–xxx

Fig. 3. Window showing dosimetric table of a particular radioactive drug.

Fig. 4. Window displaying a medical report of a patient administered by a particular radioactive drug.

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 J.EL Bakkali et al. / Applied Computing and Informatics xxx (2018) xxx–xxx 5

Fig. 5. Window showing registered patients retrieved from a local SQLite database.

After the calculation is done, multiple information include dosi- radiopharmaceutical drugs provided by ICRP. Indeed, it can be a
metric, hospital, patient and doctor data are shown in a text editor. useful tool for avoiding human mistakes which probably can be
From this information, a medical report is built and it can be edited committed while calculating dosimetric data, and the software
by simply clicking on ‘‘Edit” button. After making a proper edition generates a medical dosimetry report for patients injected with
of the medical report document, it can be exported as PDF file, then radioactive drugs which are demanded in diagnosis examinations
printed and joined on the patient’s record. Fig. 4 gives a screenshot and it can be printed and joined on the patient’s record. For future
of the ‘‘medical report” tab component. work, we plan to add other radiopharmaceutical drugs to the pre-
Saving output data of an application is a common practice and sent software, implementing code needed for auto-sending medi-
the use of the relational database like SQLite to store patient infor- cal report via email and rewritten the present software in
mation allowing greater flexibility in searching for and displaying Android language in order to support smartphone devices.
patient-specific information (name, exam id, record date, etc.),
dosimetric data (effective dose) and doctor data (indication). References
Fig. 5 shows the registered patients database window.
[1] M.G. Stabin, MIRDOSE: personal computer software for internal dose
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26N.
[3] M.G. Stabin, R.B. Sparks, E. Crowe, OLINDA/EXM: the second-generation
The open-source project RadioPharmaDose is hosted on GitHub personal computer software for internal dose assessment in nuclear
website and it can be downloaded for free from [11]. This GUI has medicine, J. Nucl. Med. 46 (2005) 1023–1027.
been released under the GPL license. The software is a Java-based [4] DOSEFX, a software for internal dosimetry, 2017. Avaliable in https://
www.comecer.com/dosefx-software-for-internal-dosimetry.
application and it requires a Java Runtime Environment (JRE 1.8)
[5] J.L. Gómez Perales, A. García Mendoza, Freeware for reporting radiation
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<https://sourceforge.net/projects/itext/>.
ment in a terminal: [7] Michael Hagen, 2014. JTattoo-1.6.11. Avaliable in: <http://www.jtattoo.net/>.
java -jar RadioPharmaDose.jar [8] Taro L. Saito, 2016. SQLite JDBC Driver. Avaliable in: <https://github.com/
xerial/sqlite-jdbc/>.
[9] ICRP, 1998. Radiation Dose to Patients from Radiopharmaceuticals (Addendum
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[10] ICRP, 2008. Radiation Dose to Patients from Radiopharmaceuticals –
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In this paper, a reliable, user-friendly GUI open-source Java-
[11] J. EL Bakkali, 2016. RadioPharmaDose open-source software. Avaliable in:
based software has been developed that can be used effectively <https://github.com/EL-Bakkali-Jaafar/RadioPharmaDose>.
to automate the calculation of dosimetric data of a number of

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