The International Atomic Energy Agency software package for the analysis of scintigraphic renal dynamic studies: a tool for the clinician, teacher, and researcher.

Under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a new-generation, platform-independent, and x86-compatible software package was developed for the analysis of scintigraphic renal dynamic imaging studies. It provides nuclear medicine professionals cost-free access to the most recent developments in the field. The software package is a step forward towards harmonization and standardization. Embedded functionalities render it a suitable tool for education, research, and for receiving distant expert's opinions. Another objective of this effort is to allow introducing clinically useful parameters of drainage, including normalized residual activity and outflow efficiency. Furthermore, it provides an effective teaching tool for young professionals who are being introduced to dynamic kidney studies by selected teaching case studies. The software facilitates a better understanding through practically approaching different variables and settings and their effect on the numerical results. An effort was made to introduce instruments of quality assurance at the various levels of the program's execution, including visual inspection and automatic detection and correction of patient's motion, automatic placement of regions of interest around the kidneys, cortical regions, and placement of reproducible background region on both primary dynamic and on postmicturition studies. The user can calculate the differential renal function through 2 independent methods, the integral or the Rutland-Patlak approaches. Standardized digital reports, storage and retrieval of regions of interest, and built-in database operations allow the generation and tracing of full image reports and of numerical outputs. The software package is undergoing quality assurance procedures to verify the accuracy and the interuser reproducibility with the final aim of launching the program for use by professionals and teaching institutions worldwide.