S-02 Coen van Hasselt

Pirana: The flexible modeling environment for NONMEM

J.G. Coen van Hasselt (1,3), Ron J. Keizer (2,3)

1. Department of Pharmacy and Pharmacology, Netherlands Cancer Institute / Slotervaart Hospital, The Netherlands. 2. Pharmacometrics Research Group, Uppsala University, Sweden. 3. Pirana Software & Consulting B.V.

Introduction
Pirana is a modeling environment for NONMEM and PsN, and provides an easy-to-use toolkit for both novice and advanced modelers. It supports modeling on a local system or on computer clusters. Pirana can be utilized to run, manage and edit models, interpret output, and manage NONMEM installations. It is easily extendible with custom scripts, and integrates smoothly with R, Xpose4, Excel and other software. Pirana fully supports NONMEM version 7.2 and runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.

Recent major improvements

  • Full support of NONMEM 7.2, including parallelization
  • Wizard functionality to easily create NONMEM model files, PsN configuration files, and parallelization files for NM 7.2
  • Extended output functionality and improved report generation (HTML, CSV, LaTeX)
  • Version control of models and results
  • Model translator: convert any NONMEM model to R or Berkeley Madonna code

Model and results management
  • Logbook-like interface for comprehensive model management.
  • Full model manipulation support (create, edit, duplicate, remove model files).
  • Create customizable run reports (HTML / LaTeX) containing relevant results (e.g. parameter estimates, parameter precision, shrinkage, errors and warnings)
  • Extend Pirana with custom R scripts for creation of customizable posthoc run processing (e.g. diagnostic plots), with automatic loading of created plots or files. A base library of scripts is included.
  • Built-in Data Inspector for quick graphical evaluation of model output files.
  • Quickly open, edit any data file in your preferred spreadsheet application, code editor or in R.
  • Model translator: NONMEM analytical solutions or $DES (ADVAN1-6) to Berkeley Madonna, Matlab and R-deSolve code for simulation purposes.

NONMEM, PsN and Xpose

  • Install, manage and utilize multiple local and cluster NONMEM installations simultaneously.
  • Monitor intermediate progression of NONMEM runs (gradients, parameters).
  • Full support of all PsN commands with full access to associated help files.
  • Support for PsN run record syntax
  • Interface for Xpose commands: automatically creation of PDFs or export to the R GUI

Cluster support

  • Wizards for creation of configuration files for parallel computation features of NM7.2.
  • Support for SGE and Torque clusters.
  • Clusters running NONMEM can be accessed through SSH.
  • Pirana can also be installed on a server and accessed through SSH-X-window tunneling.

Licencing
Pirana is released under a Create Commons license for academic use, and a commercial license. The current version is 2.5.0, which can be downloaded from http://www.pirana-software.com/.

Reference: PAGE 21 (2012) Abstr 2470 [www.page-meeting.org/?abstract=2470]

Poster: Software Demonstration