Biomedical subjects

A Grau Malonda

Publications and source records attributed to A Grau Malonda.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Comparison of calculated spectra for the interaction of photons in a liquid scintillator. Example of 54Mn 835 keV emission.

The CIEMAT/NIST and TDCR methods in liquid scintillation counting, initially developed for the activity standardization of pure-beta radionuclides, have been extended to the standardization of electron capture and beta-gamma radionuclides. Both methods require the calculation of the energy spectrum absorbed by the liquid scintillator. For radionuclides emitting X-rays or gamma-rays, when the energy is greater than a few tens of keV the Compton interaction is important and the absorption is not total. In this case, the spectrum absorbed by the scintillator must be calculated using analytical or stochastic models. An illustration of this problem is the standardization of 54Mn, which is a radionuclide decaying by electron capture. The gamma transition, very weakly converted, leads to the emission of an 835 keV photon. The calculation of the detection efficiency of this radionuclide requires the calculation of the energy spectrum transferred to the scintillator after the absorption of the gamma ray and the associated probability of absorption. The validity of the method is thus dependent on the correct calculation of the energy transferred to the scintillator. In order to compare the calculation results obtained using various calculation tools, and to provide the metrology community with some information on the choice of these tools, the LS working group of the ICRM organised a comparison of the calculated absorbed spectra for the 835 keV photon of 54Mn. The result is the spectrum of the energy absorbed by the scintillator per emission of an 835 keV gamma ray. This exercise was proposed for a standard 20 ml LS glass vial and for LS cocktail volumes of 10 and 15 ml. The calculation was done for two different cocktails: toluene and a widely used commercial cocktail, Ultima Gold. The paper describes the results obtained by nine participants using a total of 12 calculation codes.

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PubMed2006

Mean values of the LMM Auger transition in a KLM model.

The standardization of radionuclides decaying by electron capture can be carried out in LS counters by the CIEMAT/NIST method. The KLM model considers a simplified atomic rearrangement model in which all L- and M-subshells have been averaged. In this paper, instead of considering the 22 rearrangement pathways of the KLM model, we concentrate our analysis on the pathways corresponding to L-Auger electron transition. It is proved that the counting efficiency depends strongly on the energy E(LMM). Therefore, it is important to know the optimum value for E(LMM) and how to obtain it. To this end, the equations of the probabilities and the reduced energies for 3816 atomic rearrangement pathways have been derived. To average the equations, a computer program called MOYEN has been developed. The energy E(LMM) has been computed for 55Fe and 125I from different mean value definitions.

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PubMed2006

Computational aspects in modelling the interaction of low-energy X-rays with liquid scintillators.

The commercial liquid scintillators available nowadays are mostly complex cocktails that frequently include non-negligible amounts of heavier elements than the commonly expected carbon or hydrogen. In May 1993, nine laboratories agreed to participate in the frame of the EUROMET project in a comparison of the activity concentration measurement of 55Fe. One particular aspect of the results that caught one's eye was a small systematic difference between the activity concentrations obtained with Ultima Gold and Insta Gel. The detection of the radiation emitted by EC nuclides involves, in addition to the atomic rearrangement generated by the capture of the electron by the nucleus, a frequently ignored secondary atomic rearrangement process due to photoionization. Such a process can be neglected for scintillators that only contain hydrogen and carbon, e.g., toluene, but must be taken into account when the EC nuclide solution is incorporated to cocktails with heavier elements, e.g., Ultima Gold. All along the present year, an improved version of the program EMI has been developed. This code adds the photoionization reduced energy correction to the previous versions, and successfully explains the systematic difference between the measured activity concentrations of 55Fe in Ultima Gold and Insta Gel.

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PubMed2006

Combined electron emission effects on the biologically damaging efficiency of 125I.

PURPOSE: One important obstacle in modeling the biological damage of 125I lies in the collective effects of the emitted electrons. The huge number of possible different ways of atomic rearrangement causes a strong variability in the number and energies of the emitted electrons. The aim of this work is to tabulate, separately for each atomic rearrangement pathway, the absorbed doses and the single-strand breaks (SSB) probabilities for different size nanospheres of liquid water. METHODS: A simple deterministic (non-stochastic) atomic rearrangement model of only 265 pathways is appropriate for modeling the electron-capture and internal conversion processes in 125I. The feasibility of the atomic rearrangement model is verified by comparing the SSB yield for ultrasoft X-ray sources with Lobachevsky's experimental data. RESULTS: A linear equation is sufficient for describing the SSB probability as a function of the dose absorbed in a small volume surrounding the labelled nucleotide 125I-dC. CONCLUSIONS: The application of a deterministic atomic rearrangement model to Auger electron emission spectra gives a new perspective to the study of low linear energy transfer (LET) radiation effects on DNA. The damages induced by point electron-capture (EC) sources and by macroscopic X-ray sources are compared.

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PubMed2005

The photoionization-reduced energy in LSC.

The atomic rearrangement cascade that follows the electron-capture decay process in low-Z radionuclides involves X-rays which have high photoelectric interaction probabilities. When the K-shell binding energy of the ionized atom (e.g., hydrogen) is significantly lower than the energy of the X-ray photon, the detector response to a photon-equivalent energy electron and the whole photoionization process are very similar. This is not the case when the scintillator cocktail contains larger atoms (e.g., oxygen and phosphorus in Ultima Gold). For larger Z atoms, the reduced energy of the whole photoionization process is less than the reduced energy of the interacting photon due to the nonlinear effects of ionization quenching. This paper shows the convenience of including a more detailed simulation of the photoionization process in the atomic rearrangement detection model for electron-capture nuclides such as (55)Fe, (51)Cr and (54)Mn. The need for more elaborate atomic rearrangement models is a consequence of the analysis of (125)I data.

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PubMed2001

Free parameter, figure of merit and ionization quench in liquid scintillation counting.

A statistical study of the detection process demonstrates that the free parameter is essential to compute the counting efficiency in both CIEMAT/NIST and TDCR methods. An analysis of the computed counting efficiencies shows the uselessness of old definition of the figure of merit. A new definition is required and we adopt the idea of taking quantities related with the output of the photomultiplier. In addition, we justify the application of the chemical quenching simulation with the electronic variation of the photomultiplier gain. Finally, we describe a new procedure to determine the figure of merit and the optimum ionization-quenching factor from the pulse spectrum of different radionuclides. The robustness of the new procedure is tested with three different sets of stopping power for low-energy electrons.

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PubMedDate not supplied

Ionization quenching in LSC.

Ionization quench function Q(E) introduces an important correction in the CIEMAT/NIST tracing method. In this paper we present a detailed analysis of the equations used to compute the counting efficiency of 55Fe. The counting efficiency of this radionuclide is very sensitive to the shape and values of Q(E) for this method. We demonstrate that the Birks equation and stopping power are not adequate to obtain low discrepancies between the experimental and computed efficiencies. An empirical procedure to compute accurate Q(E) functions is also given.

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PubMedDate not supplied

Inelastic scattering and stopping power of low-energy electrons (0.01-10 keV) in toluene.

In this study, the stopping power for electrons in toluene is reported for incident energies ranging from 10 to 10,000 eV. The present results have been obtained by combining the calculated inelastic electron scattering cross-sections with an experimental energy loss procedure. Calculations have been carried out by means of a quasifree absorption model whose reliability has been checked by comparison with empirical electron scattering total cross section data. Results have been compared with the high-energy stopping power data available in the literature. For energies below 1 keV these are the first results of the stopping power for electrons in toluene.

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