Case Studies

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The following case studies provide the reader with examples, where Lazarus and Free Pascal have been used for successful development of professional applications for business, science, health-care and other fields.

SimThyr and SPINA Thyr: Biomedical applications for investigation of thyroid homeostasis

Thyroid hormones play an essential role for the control of metabolism, growth and differentiation. Therefore, exact regulation of thyroid hormone levels is vital for most organisms, and its disorders lead to significant and in extremities even life-threatening diseases. This is the more important as at least 5 percent of adult persons in developed countries suffer from different forms of functional thyroid disease. This corresponds to 25 million persons in the European Union, 16 million persons in the USA and more than 6 million people in Japan.

Although the principles of thyrotropic feedback control have been described decades years ago we still have not yet gained comprehensive understanding of its dynamics. Additionally, diagnosis of thyroid disorders may be complex and ambiguous in certain situations. This was the initial point of a research programme aiming at a better understanding and improved diagnosis of thyroid homeostasis that was conducted in international cooperation of three German universities and researchers in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Singapore and Australia. The programme resulted in a new mathematical theory of thyroid feedback control that helped to explain multiple previously poorly understood phenomena like partial central hypothyroidism and non-thyroidal illness syndrome. As a part of this scientific programme two software applications have been developed, SimThyr, a continuous numerical simulation program of thyroid homeostasis and SPINA Thyr, an application that helps to determine constant structure parameters of the feedback loop.

These applications have been developed in the end of the 20th century for classical Mac OS in THINK Pascal. Alternative version of SPINA Thyr were made available for Windows and Linux with Delphi or Kylix, respectively. Fundamental changes in the landscape of operating systems, first of all the advent of new Windows versions and Mac OS X, required a redesign of these applications. In order to simplify the development process, Lazarus and Free Pascal were selected. This decision allowed for reuse of large portions of the old Pascal-based source-code while providing a modern common code base for all GUI parts on several operating systems. Porting to Lazarus and Free Pascal was done in a few weeks for both applications, although simultaneously multiple new features have been implemented, too.

Today, both applications are available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. Code maintenance is easy and straightforward due to the commond code base.

Both software tools lead to the publication of multiple papers that helped to lift our understanding of thyroid homeostasis to a new level and that also demonstrated improved options for the diagnosis of thyroid disorders.

See also