Railway Doctor

Road Doctor™ Pro and Railway Doctor are ROADSCANNERS’ flagship software products. These programs include all of the features developed for road and railway data analysis and rehabilitation design. Road Doctor™ and Railway Doctor are used mainly by companies, who have Ground Penetrating Radar equipment and want to analyse the data further on based on client needs in addition to doing the GPR interpretation

Railway Doctor is a complete software package for GPR-based analysis of railways. The software is designed specifically for railway structural surveys, data analysis and maintenance planning. The software enables the user to simultaneously view, interpret and analyze multiple datasets that use the same coordinates such as GPR data from different antennas, maps, digital video, railway databases and condition measurements. This kind of multi-parameter analysis allows user to locate problematic railway sections and define root-causes of the defects. The user can also plan track bed maintenance and renewal procedures using the Railway Doctor rehabilitation planning toolbox.

The software includes special tools for handling ground penetrating radar (GPR) data. All stages of GPR data handling, from processing and interpretation to analysis and visualization, are possible. The software can also export results to a wide variety of numerical formats for use in CAD or GIS programs.

The Railway Doctor interface is project based: the user links all gathered information to one project. Data can be attached to the software and displayed in an integrated manner where various types of datasets are synchronized with each other. Data handling and presenting capabilities are vast and versatile. The  possibility  of  data  combination  enables  the  user  to  conduct  an integrated  analysis  of  all  the  available  data  sets  on  a  single  computer  screen.

The following data can be linked to a Railway Doctor project:

• ground penetrating radar (e.g. GSSI, 3d-Radar, IDS, MALÅ, Sensors & Software, Utsi)
• reference data (e.g. sample cores)
• digital video, photos, and maps
• railway databases ( ASCII tables, MS Excel, MySQL, dBase, Oracle, MS Access, Paradox)
• railway condition data (ASCII tables, MS Excel, MySQL, dBase, Oracle, MS Access, Paradox)
• Falling weight deflectometer (Dynatest, KUAB, Carl Bro)

Ground Penetrating Radar Data Handling

The software includes pre-processing operations for both air- and ground-coupled ground penetrating radar data. Pre-processing operations common to both data types are cutting, joining, reversing, normalization of horizontal scale and channel splitting. In addition, pre-processing operations for air-coupled data include background removal and surface elevation correction.

Road Doctor™ PRO also enables on-screen data processing without pre-processing the files. This makes data handling faster and saves disk space. Possible operations are for example: background removal, DC-level correction, signal gain, horizontal and vertical filtering, Kirchoff migration, Hilbert transform, correlation filters and arithmetic operations.

The software includes effective tools for large ground penetrating radar data files as well. Interpretations are most reliable in an integrated view, linked together with reference data, video, map and other possible information. Interpretation tools include manual and automatic interface tracking, selection of the interpretation color and line type (according to the certainty of the interpretation) and the addition of labels to the profile. Interpretations can be printed using pre-defined or user defined formats.

Structure Analysis

The software analysis tools have been specially designed to serve the condition analysis and rehabilitation design of railways. Examples of analysis tools are visual distress inventory based on the video from the site, multi-parameter automatic data classification and bearing capacity calculation from FWD data and GPR interpreted layer thicknesses. Condition classification sections for repair planning can also be calculated using various weighted analyze factors chosen by the interpreter.

Rehabilitation Planning

The software enables rehabilitation planning and dimensioning for existing railways by using Odemark´s method. Layer modulus values needed in dimensioning are calculated with the help of  with a 2-3 layer Forward Calculation (from FWD data) built in the software. Tools in the software make it possible to estimate the required amount of material and the preliminary cost. The software can also be utilized by monitoring various work stages and checking quality control of a finished project with the help of GPS positioning built into the software.

External Map and Printing

All data in the software can be exported with coordinate and/or position information. The possible output formats are suitable for use in other software such as CAD programs, ArcGIS, MapInfo, etc. The software itself also has an effective tool for making theme maps of analysed results directly from various types of open datasets. Still images can be created from large files such as video and GPR data to save disk space. These still images and all other linked data can be viewed by the client with the free RDMS Viewer software. Views can be created and saved ready for the client to open, saving time and allowing the most relevant information and results of the project to be immediately focused on.