• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
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• v.41 no.3
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• pp.274-281
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• 2016

Background: Whole-body counters are widely used to evaluate internal contamination of the internal presence of gamma-emitting radionuclides. In internal dosimetry, it is a basic requirement that quality control procedures be applied to verify the reliability of the measured results. The implementation of intercomparison programs plays an important role in quality control, and the accuracy of the calibration and the reliability of the results should be verified through intercomparison. In this study, we evaluated the reliability of 2 whole-body counting systems using 2 calibration methods. Materials and Methods: In this study, 2 whole-body counters were calibrated using a reference male bottle manikin absorption (BOMAB) phantom and a Radiation Management Corporation (RMC-II) phantom. The reliability of the whole-body counting systems was evaluated by performing an intercomparison with International Atomic Energy Agencyto assess counting efficiency according to the type of the phantom. Results and Discussion: In the analysis of counting efficiency using the BOMAB phantom, the performance criteria of the counters were satisfied. The relative bias of activity for all radionuclides was -0.16 to 0.01 in the Fastscan and -0.01 to 0.03 in the Accuscan. However, when counting efficiency was analyzed using the RMC- II phantom, the relative bias of $^{241}Am$ activity was -0.49 in the Fastscan and 0.55 in the Accuscan, indicating that its performance criteria was not satisfactory. Conclusion: The intercomparison process demonstrated the reliability of whole-body counting systems calibrated with a BOMAB phantom. However, when the RMC-II phantom was used, the accuracy of measurements decreased for low-energy nuclides. Therefore, it appears that the RMC-II phantom should only be used for efficiency calibration for high-energy nuclides. Moreover, a novel phantom capable of matching the efficiency of the BOMAB phantom in low-energy nuclides should be developed.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.51 no.6
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• pp.1616-1625
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• 2019

Measuring occurrence times of random events, aimed to determine the statistical properties of the governing stochastic process, is a basic topic in science and engineering, and has been the subject of numerous mathematical modeling approaches. Often, true statistical properties deviate from measured properties due to the so called dead time phenomenon, where for a certain time period following detection, the detection system is not operational. Understanding the dead time effect is especially important in radiation measurements, often characterized by high count rates and a non-reducible detector dead time (originating in the physics of particle detection). The effect of dead time can be interpreted as a suitable rarefied sequence of the original time sequence. This paper provides a limit theorem for a high rate (diffusion-scale) counter with extendable (Type II) dead time, where the underlying counting process is a renewal process with finite second moment for the inter-event distribution. The results are very general, in the sense that they refer to a general inter arrival time and a random dead time with general distribution. Following the theoretical results, we will demonstrate the applicability of the results in three applications: serially connected components, multiplicity counting and measurements of aerosol spatial distribution.