• 2007-01-10 Vesa Oikonen

• TPC
• Data analysis
• File formats
• Software
• Vocabulary

IF file

Background

IF format is used for example in Imanet Hammersmith to save the input (plasma corrected for metabolites and whole blood) time-activity curves (TACs).

Specifications

• IF specification 1.0 2007-02-10

Format conversion between IF and DFT (*.kbq)

In Turku, the metabolite corrected plasma TAC (e.g. *ap_pure.kbq) and whole blood TAC (e.g. *ab.kbq) are stored in separate files, but can be converted to one IF file or vice versa using dft2if and if2dft.

Note that before file format conversion you may need to remove the correction for physical decay, change the sample times from minutes to seconds, or convert the units of radioactivity using dftunit.

To use IF data as input to in-house modelling software, the files must first be converted into local format and separate files for whole blood and metabolite corrected plasma. If IF data is not directly used as model input, recent versions of software (starting in the end of year 2005) that have been compiled with libtpccurveio version 1.2.1 or later (you can check this by giving command line option -v to the program) can identify and read IF datafiles instead of DFT or *.kbq files, if filename extension is *.if. However, in-house software saves TAC data always in DFT format.