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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.
A. M. Reda
Nuclear Technology | Volume 194 | Number 3 | June 2016 | Pages 400-405
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NT15-92
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An investigation room to interrogate packages and baggage at airports, based on a neutron-induced gamma-ray method, was designed using the MCNP5 Monte Carlo radiation transport code. A pulsed neutron generator source of interval time responses 10 μs turned on and 100 μs turned off was used for the investigation. Gamma-ray emissions in the forward, scattering angle of 90 deg, and backward directions were detected in the two cases of neutron generator (turned on/turned off). The detected data revealed that gamma rays in the forward direction have a signal-to-background ratio higher than the other positions. In addition, thermal neutron capture detected in the turned-off interval showed larger numbers of good signal-to-background ratio than that in the turned-on interval. The results show that the detection of gamma rays induced with a pulsed neutron source can be applied as a basic technique in airports to identify smuggled illicit materials.