Nuclear Engineering and Technology

Korean Nuclear Society (한국원자력학회)
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Optimization of image reconstruction method for dual-particle time-encode imager through adaptive response correction

  • Dong Zhao (Department of Nuclear Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics) ;
  • Wenbao Jia (Department of Nuclear Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics) ;
  • Daqian Hei (School of Nuclear Science and Technology, Lanzhou University) ;
  • Can Cheng (Department of Nuclear Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics) ;
  • Wei Cheng (Department of Nuclear Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics) ;
  • Xuwen Liang (Department of Nuclear Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics) ;
  • Ji Li (Nuclear Power Institute of China)
  • Received : 2022.10.16
  • Accepted : 2023.02.03
  • Published : 2023.05.25
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Abstract

Time-encoded imagers (TEI) are important class of instruments to search for potential radioactive sources to prevent illicit transportation and trafficking of nuclear materials and other radioactive sources. The energy of the radiation cannot be known in advance due to the type and shielding of source is unknown in practice. However, the response function of the time-encoded imagers is related to the energy of neutrons or gamma-rays. An improved image reconstruction method based on MLEM was proposed to correct for the energy induced response difference. In this method, the count vector versus time was first smoothed. Then, the preset response function was adaptively corrected according to the measured counts. Finally, the smoothed count vector and corrected response were used in MLEM to reconstruct the source distribution. A one-dimensional dual-particle time-encode imager was developed and used to verify the improved method through imaging an Am-Be neutron source. The improvement of this method was demonstrated by the image reconstruction results. For gamma-ray and neutron images, the angular resolution improved by 17.2% and 7.0%; the contrast-to-noise ratio improved by 58.7% and 14.9%; the signal-to-noise ratio improved by 36.3% and 11.7%, respectively.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This work was a project supported by the NSAF (Grant No.U1930125), the Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province (Grant No. KYCX22_0354), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11975121 and 12105143).

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