• Home »
• Partnerships

MINERVA is a specialized treatment planning software system for research radiotherapy applications. MINERVA is Beta-stage software and is not intended for prospective human radiotherapy planning. The Idaho National Laboratory (INL) developed MINERVA in collaboration with Montana State University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the University of California-Davis.

MINERVA is a patient-centric, multi-modal, radiation treatment environment, which can be used for planning and analyzing several radiotherapy modalities, either singly or combined, using common treatment planning tools. It employs an integrated, lightweight plug-in architecture to accommodate multi-modal treatment planning using standard interface components. The design also facilitates the future integration of improved planning technologies.

The MINERVA system includes the image processing, model definition, and data analysis modules with a central module to coordinate communication and data transfer. Dose calculation is performed by source and transport plugin modules, which communicate either directly through the database or through MINERVA's openly published, extensible markup language (XML)- based application programmer’s interface (API). All internal data is managed by a database management system and can be exported to other applications or new installations through the API data formats.

INL invites potential end users and developers in the radiotherapy community to evaluate MINERVA. There is no fee for this use, but for now individuals and institutions are asked to agree to conduct their evaluation under a license agreement. This license imposes the minimum obligations required by INL to make the software available to the end user community.

For access to MINERVA now, download the evaluation license ( 20kB PDF), print it, complete the attached registration form, have the license signed by an authorized representative of your institution, and fax the document to John Snyder at (208) 526-0876.

The MINERVA user manual is also available. ( 3.1M B PDF)

To operate MINERVA, the following software is required:

• Java Runtime Environment (downloadable at http://www.java.com/en/download/manual.jsp)
• A database such as MySQL (downloadable at http://www.mysql.com/)

For additional information about MINERVA, contact Dan Wessol, INL's Principal Investigator for MINERVA.