Beam Data Loader

Varian Medical Systems, Inc. is the world's leading manufacturer of integrated cancer therapy systems. The Clinac family of medical linear accelerators is one of their largest product lines, with over 4,200 systems in service around the world. Oncologists use Clinac machines to direct radiation at cancerous tumors in a patient.

Clinac machines use several configurable technologies to control the direction, quality, and dispersal of radiation beams, including particle beam composition, the Multi-Leaf Collimator (MLC), and the Enhanced Dynamic Wedge (EDW). Particle beams can be composed of electrons or photons. The MLC is a highly adjustable shutter-like device that allows the oncologist to precisely direct the target areas and intensity of therapeutic radiation. The EDW is also used to control Clinac radiation beams.

Varian provides sophisticated software that allows oncologists and laboratory technicians to plan and execute radiation therapies for the Clinac series using a Graphic User Interface (GUI). This software runs on an HP-UX workstation, and the same applications are used for many different models and machines of the Clinac system. The Clinac control software relies on a directory structure with a set of files to specify correctly and completely which options are available for a particular Clinac installation. These files are referred to as beam data files.

Many Clinac machines are possible and there are many valid combinations of beam data files. Eagle has developed a flexible, convenient, fast and reliable way to load beam data files for specific machines. The Beam Data Loader System allows a user to define various Clinac machines and to automatically load the appropriate data from a CD-ROM to the correct locations in the file system of the workstation used to run Clinac control software.

RAID Control and GUI

The RAID GUI system provides an attractive, easy-to-use interface to the Maximum Strategy Gen5 and proFILE RAID storage systems. It offers a well-organized GUI front end for the dozens of configuration and maintenance commands available to the end user, and provides the user with performance metrics and real-time system monitoring.

The RAID system is controlled through commands issued by the RAID GUI. Commands are issued over the COM port to the RAID system (mimicking a command line), and then the data returned from the command is interpreted. The returned data allows the RAID GUI to present an accurate view of the state of the system through the GUI and to provide an interface to change that state. The interface to the set of commands is presented in a simple and easy-to-use fashion. System performance statistics and hardware status are presented in effective graphical displays. The system serves as both an administrative tool and a invaluable aid in monitoring system activities.

This system, in a sense, acts as a "translator" between the UI presentation of RAID state information and UI-driven commands, on the one hand, and the RAID system's native command structure on the other. The RAID command structure was not originally designed to support this kind of "front end," so it is necessary to map the "command language" of the RAID system to the "command and display structure" of the UI. The correspondences are not 1-to-1, and a significant amount of object-oriented design was required in order to implement this mapping appropriately.