Development of a software for radiopharmaceutical management in nuclear medicine

Abstract

Radiopharmaceuticals are radioactive drugs injected intravenously into patients for diagnostic imaging and therapeutic treatments in nuclear medicine. To achieve an accurate interpretation of the results or a correct therapeutic effect, these medicines must be strictly supervised by the radiopharmacy department from the moment their raw material arrives at the hospital until its administration to the patient. This project aims to develop an user-friendly and efficient software that integrates all processes involved in the radiopharmaceutical management of the Unitat de Radiofàrmacia de l’Hospital Clínic which are currently stored in independent Excel documents leading to human errors and complex dose traceabilities. At present, some software is available on the market, but they are too expensive and none of them fulfils all their requested demands. To develop the application, several programming options were evaluated. Finally, the software was developed from scratch in an opensource Python environment, Anaconda. It is mainly based on Tkinter and SQLite packages for creating graphical interface and database communications, respectively. Unfortunately, the external connections with activimeters and the SAP platform did not succeed due to time limitations, lack of knowledge and incompatibility. At last, the prototype was evaluated and the feedback from three radiopharmacists was collected after testing it. As the software was built from zero, its main advantage is being modelled based on all the radiopharmacy’s demands. Although it fulfils currently most of their requirements, there are still necessary improvements to reach its full potential. Besides, it could encourage other hospital departments to introduce hospital information systems.