A study of neutron radiation quality with a tissue-equivalent proportional counter for a low-energy accelerator-based in vivo neutron activation facility
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The accelerator-based in vivo neutron activation facility at McMaster University has been used successfully for the measurement of several minor and trace elements in human hand bones due to their importance to health. Most of these in vivo measurements have been conducted at a proton beam energy (E(p)) of 2.00 MeV to optimise the activation of the selected element of interest with an effective dose of the same order as that received in chest X rays. However, measurement of other elements at the same facility requires beam energies other than 2.00 MeV. The range of energy of neutrons produced at these proton beam energies comes under the region where tissue-equivalent proportional counters (TEPCs) are known to experience difficulty in assessing the quality factor and dose equivalent. In this study, the response of TEPCs was investigated to determine the quality factor of neutron fields generated via the (7)Li(p, n)(7)Be reaction as a function of E(p) in the range 1.884-2.56 MeV at the position of hand irradiation in the facility. An interesting trend has been observed in the quality factor based on ICRP 60, Q(ICRP60), such that the maximum value was observed at E(p)=1.884 MeV (E(n)=33±16 keV) and then continued to decline with increasing E(p) until achieving a minimum value at E(p)=2.0 MeV despite a continuous increase in the mean neutron energy with E(p). This observation is contrary to what has been observed with direct fast neutrons where the quality factor was found to increase continuously with an increase in E(p) (i.e. increasing E(n)). The series of measurements conducted with thermal and fast neutron fields demonstrate that the (14)N(n, p)(14)C produced 580 keV protons in the detector play an important role in the response of the counter under 2.0 MeV proton energy (E(n) ≤ 250 keV). In contrast to the lower response of TEPCs to low-energy neutrons, the quality factor is overestimated in the range 1-2 depending on beam energy <2.0 MeV. This study provides an insight to understanding the response of TEPCs in low-energy neutron fields where the neutrons are moderated using a polyethylene moderator.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".