Dorn

Dorn is a GUI for generating individualised close contact restrictions for nuclear medicine patients, particularly radionuclide therapy patients.

Executable provided with release

Each release on GitHub includes a zip file. The zip file contains an executable file Dorn.exe that can be used to run the Dorn program on Windows 10 and 11 systems without needing to install Python and Dorn's other dependencies.

Installation

Dorn can be installed as a Python package if you have Python version 3.9 or higher. In the directory containing the pyproject.toml file:

python -m pip install .

Then run the command dorn to start the GUI.

glowgreen package

Dorn uses the Python package glowgreen for calculating radiation dose from contact patterns and restriction periods.

Building your own standalone executable

In the directory containing the pyproject.toml file:

python -m pip install . .[windows] .[freeze]
cxfreeze build

This generates a directory called something like build/exe.win-amd64-3.11 containing a file Dorn.exe. You can copy the exe.win-amd64-3.11 directory to another computer (of the same architecture) and run Dorn from the Dorn.exe file.

Creating the icon file

The icon file icofile.ico was generated from shovel.png in Python. Something like:

python -m pip install Pillow

Then

from PIL import Image
filename = 'shovel.png'
img = Image.open(filename)
icon_sizes = [(16,16), (32, 32), (48, 48), (64,64)]
img.save('new_icofile.ico', sizes=icon_sizes)

Source

https://github.com/SAMI-Medical-Physics/dorn

Bug tracker

https://github.com/SAMI-Medical-Physics/dorn/issues

Author

Jake Forster (jake.forster@sa.gov.au)

Copyright

Dorn is copyright (C) 2022-2025 South Australia Medical Imaging.

License

MIT License. See LICENSE file.

Citation

See CITATION.cff file.

Acknowledgments

The Dorn icon was designed by Kevin Hickson.

Development

Program overview

• Patient data is stored in an ordered dictionary. Program reads/writes patient data to XML file.

• Program settings are stored in another ordered dictionary, which reads/writes to settings.xml in the user's configuration directory. On Windows this is C:\Users\<USER>\AppData\Local\Dorn\Dorn\settings.xml. For backward compatibility, if there is a settings.xml in the current working directory, that file will be used instead.

• Some settings cannot be edited via the GUI, such as the therapy options and the radionuclide data. The user may add at most 1 additional therapy options with measured clearance data and 1 additional therapy option with generic clearance via the command line interface (see below).

• A command-line interface is provided that offers additional flexibility. To see the command line options, enter:

    dorn -h
  

  or with the executable:

    Dorn.exe -h
  

Ideas for new features

• For therapy options that use generic clearance, allow the user to provide an initial dose rate measurement to determine the clearance function parameter: initial dose rate at 1 m.
• Add more dose rate measurement time points and a scroll bar.
• Add curve fit model representing no excretion at night. The difficulty will be adding the support in glowgreen.
• Add a name field for the detector.
• Attempt to propagate uncertainty from the contact pattern onto the calculated restriction period or dose.
• Allow the user to edit/add contact patterns.