Development of a comprehensive software application for calculations in nuclear medicine and radiopharmacy.

UNLABELLED In the daily practice of in-hospital or centralized radiopharmacies, there is a need to perform reliable numeric calculations. Furthermore, several nuclear medicine diagnostic tests also involve carrying out calculations. In both cases, these calculations are sometimes complex or tedious and prone to error. We report the development of a computer software program that performs a comprehensive range of calculations required in radiopharmacy and nuclear medicine diagnostic tests. METHODS This software was developed and compiled in the Visual Basic programming language using algorithms and methods reflected in the scientific literature. RESULTS We developed 2 versions of the software program, which we call Nucleolab. It automatically performs calculations relating to radiopharmacy practice as well as 9 diagnostic nuclear medicine tests. The 0.1 version performs all these calculations, and the 1.2 version also has a database that enables the user to save and recover diagnostic test results and issue custom reports. The software can be downloaded at www.radiofarmacia.org/nucleolab-english. CONCLUSION To our knowledge, ours is the first attempt to develop a comprehensive software application that facilitates calculations in nuclear medicine and radiopharmacy, reducing errors and improving efficiency and accuracy.