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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.
Christopher R. Greulich, James Baciak (Univ of Florida), Kaushik Banerjee, Stylianos Chatzidakis (ORNL)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 1080-1084
A cosmic ray Muon Flexible Framework for Spectral Generation for Monte Carlo Applications (MUFFSgenMC) has been developed to support state-of-the-art cosmic ray muon detection and tomographic applications. The flexible framework allows for easy, fast creation of source terms for popular Monte Carlo applications such as GEANT4 and MCNP, simplifying the process of simulations. The flexible framework contains a variety of analytical, numerical, and parametric models that capture the main characteristics of the muon energy and angular distributions in the range 0 to 90 and at arbitrary energies. The primary model for muon energy distribution is an implementation of the Smith and Duller phenomenological model. The predictions for muon energies in ranging from 1 GeV to 1 TeV and zenith angles 0 to 90 are validated against an extensive series of experimental spectrum measurements. Finally, the open source code available on Matlab’s Mathworks File Exchange (https://www.mathworks.com/ matlabcentral/fileexchange/65585-muffsgenmc) was written to allow users to easily modify and expand the code. MUFFSgenMC can facilitate the study of cosmic ray muons for nuclear nonproliferation applications and will enable development of new muon-based detection and imaging techniques by providing an easy source term generator. 1