Internal radionuclide therapy: software for treatment planning using tomographic data

AIM: Accurate dosimetry must be performed for each patient before therapy with unsealed radionuclides. Recently, the software tool ULMDOS was developed to facilitate planar dosimetric calculations and to support traceability and documentation as a prerequisite for good clinical practice. Here, the extended version of ULMDOS for processing of tomographic data is presented. METHODS: ULMDOS is developed in IDL 6.1 (Interactive Data Language) under Windows XP/2000. Serial tomographic data can be loaded in an ECAT7 or DICOM format, and presented as maximum intensity projection. The definition of volumes of interest is supported by various tools (e.g., freehand, isocontour, polygon), region growing, and cluster analysis. Residence times are calculated from fits of the time activity data to exponential functions. RESULTS, DISCUSSION: Quantitative 3-dimensional data allow performing a more individualized dosimetry, as problems due to organ overlay, insufficient attenuation and scatter correction in the planar approach can be avoided. For traceability, documentation, retrospective examination and later processing all data can be saved in binary or ASCII format. Dosimetric calculations can be conducted within a single environment, thus it spares the time-consuming transfer of data between different software tools.