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Reimagining nuclear materials for the future of medicine
Nuclear medicine has come a long way since Henri Becquerel first observed the penetrating energy of radioactive materials in 1896. Today, technetium-99m alone is used in more than 40 million diagnostic procedures every year—from cardiovascular imaging and bone scans to cancer detection—making it the undisputed workhorse of nuclear medicine. That single statistic tells you something important: An enormous portion of modern diagnostic medicine rests on a surprisingly narrow foundation, one built around a small number of aging research reactors that were never originally designed for continuous isotope production.
Jin-Yang Li, Sheng-Miao Guo, Long Gu, You-Peng Zhang, Sheng Yang, Guan Wang, Yu-Jie Tao, Yong-Quan Wang, Hu-Shan Xu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 5 | July 2021 | Pages 340-349
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1904597
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is one of the largest international cooperative projects with many participants from different research groups in institutes and universities all over the world and is expected to achieve nuclear fusion energy output and to be operated in steady state with tritium self-sufficiency. The conventional design of the ITER-type facility always directly faces challenges of operation difficulties in the assembly and maintenance processes considering that there are collision interference and corresponding precision problems within the constrained space; consequently, it is not possible to provide for research purposes qualitative information for human intuition and quantitative contents with professional advice. Therefore, it is necessary to find a better solution for researchers and operators to get a highly efficient group-based work form without being blocked for reasons of geography. In this context, virtual reality technology has been introduced in the digital assembly and maintenance training platform of the ITER-type mock-up at the Institute of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and it has many useful features, including real-time collision detection in assembly tasks with simplified trigger mesh structures by means of the ray-casting method, and three-dimensional visualization of the topological structure in the welding and brazing maintenance using the UV unwrapping and remapping methods considering the conversion process from digital values to gray-scale texture, which can meet the flexible and diverse design requirements and provide feasibility of training at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.