An Efficient Process Control System for Radioactive Pharmaceutical Composition Equipment

摘要

Automated medical equipment is being popularly developed to replace human operators who conduct dangerous, repetitive and/or dexterous operations. From this perspective, the automated radioactive pharmaceutical composition equipment is quite indispensible for medical inspection since radioactive pharmaceutical composition processes are very sensitive to radiochemical reaction thus can cause radiation exposure to operators. For example, PET (Positron Emission Tomography) is a radioactivity-based medical inspection method that applies radioactive medicines into patients and diagnoses diseases by measuring radiation from them. Thus, the PET equipment should be strong enough against radioactivity in terms of hardware, while it should prevent radiation leaking and escape from malfunction in terms of software. Moreover, it has to collect sensory information for equipment control, supporting mass communication for feedback information. Thus, this study develops an efficient process control system for the PET radioactive pharmaceutical composition equipment, which can prevent operators from programming mistakes, and from the abnormal control of the equipment. The developed system can check mistakes and errors by simulating radioactive chemical reaction processes on the user interfaces, supporting a stable composition of radioactive medicines by batch transferring data to CPU through an IO map irrespective of communication interruption. Mass communication for sensory information and fast control is possible by enabling Ethernet among upper level PCs and device modules.