Development of software phantoms for software validation

Nuclear medicine software is expected to meet certain criteria. The specifications are frequently not available to the user and, as a consequence, the performance of a particular software package may not meet the users' expectations. Under most circumstances this may be evident immediately, but frequently the user will assume certain specifications based upon the clinical procedure that is being performed, and assume that the software should function in a certain fashion to give the value of a desired parameter. To this end, it is useful to have a number of software phantoms which can act as standard data sets for validation of the software and ensure that the results obtained do meet expectations. A number of problems surround the development of a set of software phantoms that can be transported between different systems. One solution is the creation of mathematical phantoms, in which case algorithms or source code may be transportable. This paper describes four such mathematical phantoms that have been used to validate an ejection fraction and Fourier analysis package. This particular software package has been found lacking in several respects, none of which would have been evident from the documentation provided. (author). 12 refs, 4 figs