A Six Compartment Model for the Study of Early Kinetics of Thyroid Trap in Humans — Methodology and Results

The possibility of using sophisticated computer systems, especially concerning calculating power and man-machine dialogue, in a clinical setting is the basis for a new surge in model analysis in nuclear medicine. The combination of this analysis with self-modeling type methods, used for automating the processing of dynamic examinations (1,2), should lead to their development in parallel with the increasing importance of physiological and metabolic studies (3). Recently, the group of Berman (4) has introduced a new conversational version of the well known Saam program. To our knowledge this software was designed for large computer systems and has not yet been installed in the more modest systems, generally used in clinical practice. The conversational software, Clinmod that we have developed, can be used for the compartmental analysis of data acquired in dynamic scintillation camera studies. The software was written in Fortran and installed in an Infogram* computer. We described the method used in our laboratory for processing dynamic studies with compartmental models and the results obtained in a comparison of early iodine and technetium kinetics.