# MIRDCalc – A Community Tool for Deriving and Reporting Patient Organ Doses in Nuclear Medicine, Computed Tomography, and Hybrid Imaging

> **NIH NIH U01** · SLOAN-KETTERING INST CAN RESEARCH · 2020 · $652,054

## Abstract

Project Summary
The assessment of radiation organ absorbed dose to patients plays a critical role in both the development and
clinical use of radiopharmaceuticals for both diagnostic imaging (cancer/disease detection) and radiation therapy
(cancer treatment). Dosimetry also provides the basis of imaging/treatment optimization, and its accessibility and
maturation will help define personalized medicine as applied to medical imaging and nuclear therapies in the
coming decades. A variety of software codes exist for patient dosimetry in nuclear medicine, but they tend to
reside within two extremes of functionality. At one end are more simplistic NM dosimetry tools that merge animal-
derived or personalized biodistribution data with standard (population-averaged) models, a technique that has
proved valuable historically but has seen minimal technological advancement. At the other end are complex NM
dosimetry codes that import patient-specific CT/PET/SPECT images and allow for accurate, but computationally
intensive, Monte Carlo simulation-based dosimetry. The issue with these higher-end codes is that they are much
more nuanced, resource intensive, and tend to only reside within research-based medical institutions with expert
support staff.
In this Biomedical Research Partnership between MSK and UF, a new generation of nuclear medicine patient
dosimetry code will be developed and released at no cost to the imaging and clinical community. The code –
MIRDcalc – is built upon the universally available Microsoft Excel platform and can be used with an easy
interactive interface or automated DOS command line. The database powering MIRDcalc stores all necessary
information for implementing biodistribution-to-dosimetry calculations using the MIRD schema. The current
generation of MIRDcalc thus will not include acquisition and derivation of the input time-activity data, which is
beyond the scope of the current application, but will be incorporated into future versions of this code. It includes
radionuclide S values for 333 radioisotopes, associated with 12 modern ICRP reference phantoms each with 58
source organs and 44 target organs and is readily expandable to accommodate additional isotopes and
phantoms.
The MIRDcalc software will be a free tool providing dosimetry that meets current standards, and a platform for
further innovations as well as a central framework for supporting a dosimetry user community. Our planned
innovations address issues of personalization, uncertainty calculation, documentation, and other key
considerations. Of note, and a key feature of this partnership, is the addition of CT organ dosimetry to MIRDcalc,
which presently does not exist in any current nuclear medicine software code despite the universal adoption of
combination PET-CT and the ever-increasing penetration of SPECT-CT scanners in diagnostic radiology and
nuclear medicine.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10017971
- **Project number:** 5U01EB028234-02
- **Recipient organization:** SLOAN-KETTERING INST CAN RESEARCH
- **Principal Investigator:** WESLEY E BOLCH
- **Activity code:** U01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $652,054
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2019-09-13 → 2024-05-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10017971

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10017971, MIRDCalc – A Community Tool for Deriving and Reporting Patient Organ Doses in Nuclear Medicine, Computed Tomography, and Hybrid Imaging (5U01EB028234-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10017971. Licensed CC0.

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