Preface

Structure of the book

Chapter 1 gives a brief background on the software used in the past in Biological Dosimetry and outlines the reasons to use R and R Shiny as the basis of Biodose Tools.

Chapter 2 gives a brief technical review of the implementation of Biodose Tools, and introduces the basic design principles behind the user interface.

Chapter 3 introduces the user to Biodose Tools and how to use it either online or locally in RStudio. Chapters 4 and 5 cover a series of examples to illustrate the functionality of the different modules. These three chapters should be sufficient to get most readers comfortable with Biodose Tools itself (either using the {shiny} interface or the R API).

Chapters 7, 8, and 9 are a comprehensive review of the different statistical methods and tests used and available throughout Biodose Tools, geared towards mathematicians and biologists alike.

Appendix A explains how to give feedback of the app. In Appendix B we provide a small guide to cite Biodose Tools.

To sum it up, this book is a comprehensive reference of Biodose Tools. You can follow the 80/20 rule when reading it. Some sections are there for the sake of completeness, and not all sections are equally useful to the particular use case your laboratory or institution may have to use Biodose Tools.

About the authors

The project is initially developed by RENEB association, as a collaboration between Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Bundesamt für Strahlenschutz (BfS), Durham University (DU), Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN), Universidad de la Rioja (UdR), and UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA).

Principal contributors

Name Institution Role
Alfredo Hernández UAB Statistical programmer and main author
Joan Francesc Barquinero UAB Biologist
David Endesfelder BfS Mathematician
Pere Puig UAB Mathematician
Lleonard Barrios UAB Biologist
Jochen Einbeck DU Statistician
Amine Benadjaoud IRSN Biostatistician
Elizabeth Ainsbury UKHSA Physicist

Contributors

Name Institution Role
Ulrike Kulka BfS Biologist
Eric Grègoire IRSN Biologist
Manuel Higueras UdR Mathematician
Gaëtan Gruel IRSN Biologist
Ursula Oestreicher BfS Biologist

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all members of the RENEB association who helped in the design and testing of the package and Shiny app. This research was done with support from a grant from the Spanish government (ref. PCIN-2017-077) and a grant from the Consejo de Seguridad Nuclear Español (BOE-A-2019-311).

We would also like to thank everyone outside of the Biodose Tools team who helped providing subtitles for our video tutorials on YouTube, in particular Tomisato Miura from Hirosaki University, who helped with the Japanese subtitles, and Tai-I Chen, who helped with the Chinese (Simplified) and Chinese (Traditional) subtitles.