Preferences

Plaque Simulator User's Guide

Preferences

General | Document | Date & Time | Professional | Files & Folders | Images | Tablet
This guide topic will take you through the steps necessary to customize the preferences for your institution.

The Preferences settings for Plaque Simulator are found under the File menu and are divided into 7 groups; General, Document, Date & Time, Professional, Files & Folders, Images and tablet. Recommended preferences settings are listed below.

If you select any of the preference group dialogs and make any changes you must click the Save button to make any changes permanent. The preference settings are saved in a file in the Preferences folder inside the Mac OS's System folder. Clicking the OK button exits the dialog and installs any changes only for the duration of the current planning session. The Cancel button exits the dialog and restores the settings to whatever they were when you entered the dialog.

From the File menu select Preferences and then select one of the preferences dialogs from the heirarchal menu.

General Preferences

Among the checkboxes at the top of this dialog, the default recommendations for 1999 are to check Center images in window, Track recent plans, and NIST 1999 calibrations. You can experiment with customizing the behavior of Plaque Simulator by activating some of the other settings once you are completely familiar with the program.

general

For best 3D rendering you should be running Plaque Simulator on a computer with a 400 MHz or better G3 or G4 processor, an ATI RAGE128 or better 3D accelerator, MacOS 9.0.4, OpenGL 1.1.3, Quickdraw3D 1.6 and Quicktime 4.1.2. OpenGL is required for this version of Plaque Simulator. Version 1.1.3 is installed automatically with Mac OS 9.0.4. The latest version is usually available as a free download from Apple Computer's internet servers.

The 3D Graphics group allows you to select a 3D rendering API. If your computer has ATI accelerated graphics (either built-in or added on) you should select OpenGL, if you have an older PowerPC computer without an ATI accelerator, try Quickdraw3D or OpenGL and use whichever gives the best performance. Also available is the 680x0 renderer which is an updated version of the private 3D rendering system under which this program was originally developed in the late 1980s. It is intended to provide backwards compatibility with older systems that use Motorola 68040 processors. Operation will be very SLOW and some display options are not available, but it will work.

The Windows colors group selects the background color for the Setup window and others. White is the recommended color for most situations.

Document Preferences

The document preferences dialog allows you to customize some aspects of the patient treatment documents. The check boxes on the left are used to create a document group. All documents checked will be printed if you choose Print group from the File menu. The default margin settings will be applied to each document at startup.

The picture group on the right allows you to customize the graphic that is placed on page 2 of the treatment plan document. The available space for this graphic is about 300 x 200 pixels. The default graphic is a radiation safety survey form. You can replace this graphic with any Quicktime compatible image (ex. PICT, TIFF, GIF, JPG, etc...) that fits in the available space. The actual amount of space available varies with your practice. If you use CT images and fundus photos to localize the tumor and want thumbnails of those on the treatment plan then less space is available for other pictures. To install a custom graphic click the Select button and navigate to the desired image file. The MacOS filespec for this file will be recorded. The Clear button resets the program to use the default graphic.

Date & Time Preferences

The buttons in the Date format and the Time format group select the order and manner in which date and time are displayed in the Patient Data dialog and elsewhere. In the USA the recommended formats are month/day/year, mmm/d/yyyy and 24-hr.

Professional Preferences

In the Clinic group, enter the name of your department. Additional ID fields are provided as a convenience and can be used in any way you like.

In the Professional group you can enter the name of a Physician, Physicist, and any other identifying information for those persons if desired.

File & Folder Preferences

The standard name of the master "Data" folder is "Plaque Simulator Data".

Plaque Simulator organizes all of its support files in a master data folder. The master Data folder must reside in the same directory as the Plaque Simulator application itself and by default is titled "Plaque Simulator Data".

Images Preferences

At this time the importer only supports DICOM format images. There is also a commercial DICOM importer for Quicktime available. See http://www.escape.gr/dicom/index.html.

Medical images are considered to be 16 bit grayscale. The data window is the anticipated range of values in the image. The image window is the range of the data window which is converted into 256 gray levels for display. Data values for water, and density corresponding to the image window limits may optionally be entered. It also helps when importing medical images to know if multi-byte integers are stored in Big (the readable way!) or Little Endian (the Intel way) format.

Tablet Preferences

Plaque Simulator version 4 and greater supports graphics tablets such as the Wacom USB Intuos series. You can use the tablet & stylus in lieu of a mouse to operate the entire the program if you wish. In addition, the Retinal diagram window can be calibrated to digitize fundus photos and hardcopy retinal diagrams from the tablet. (The retinal diagram window can also be calibrated via the Images window to Quicktime compatible images which were digitized using a flatbed scanner or video digitizer.) The recommended settings for a 12x12 in. Intuos tablet are shown above.

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