title: Development of a radiopharmaceutical dose calculator for pediatric patients undergoing diagnostic nuclear medicine studies.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  It is important to ensure that as low as reasonably achievable (ALARA) concept during the radiopharmaceutical (RPH) dose administration in pediatric patients. Several methods have been suggested over the years for the calculation of individualized RPH dose, sometimes requiring complex calculations and large variability exists for administered dose in children. The aim of the present study was to develop a software application that can calculate and store RPH dose along with patient record.
  
  
  METHODS
  We reviewed the literature to select the dose formula and used Microsoft Access (a software package) to develop this application. We used the Microsoft Excel to verify the accurate execution of the dose formula. The manual and computer time using this program required for calculating the RPH dose were compared.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The developed application calculates RPH dose for pediatric patients based on European Association of Nuclear Medicine dose card, weight based, body surface area based, Clark, Solomon Fried, Young and Webster's formula. It is password protected to prevent the accidental damage and stores the complete record of patients that can be exported to Excel sheet for further analysis. It reduces the burden of calculation and saves considerable time i.e., 2 min computer time as compared with 102 min (manual calculation with the calculator for all seven formulas for 25 patients).
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The software detailed above appears to be an easy and useful method for calculation of pediatric RPH dose in routine clinical practice. This software application will help in helping the user to routinely applied ALARA principle while pediatric dose administration.
authors.affiliation: Department of Nuclear Medicine, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India.
authors.forename: Anil Kumar
authors.initials: AK
authors.lastname: Pandey
authors.forename: Sanjay Kumar
authors.initials: SK
authors.lastname: Sharma
authors.forename: Punit
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Sharma
authors.forename: Priyanka
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Gupta
authors.forename: Rakesh
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Kumar
keywords: As low as reasonably achievable; pediatric dose; radiopharmaceutical; software