Neutron-gamma discrimination with broaden the lower limit of energy threshold using BP neural network

Appl Radiat Isot. 2024 Mar;205:111179. doi: 10.1016/j.apradiso.2024.111179. Epub 2024 Jan 9.ABSTRACTNeutron-gamma discrimination is a tough and significative in experimental neutrons measurements procedure, especially for low-energy neutrons signal discrimination. In this work, based on the Pulse Shape Discrimination (PSD) and Back-Propagation (BP) artificial neural networks, a neutron-gamma discrimination method is developed to broaden the lower limit of energy threshold with the hidden layer of 20 neurons. Compared with neutron-gamma discrimination method based on PSD only, the developed neutron-gamma discrimination method based on the PSD and BP-ANN can discriminate neutron and gamma-ray signals with low energy threshold, which can discriminate signals up to 99.93%. Moreover, this work can reduce the energy threshold from 350 keV to 70 keV, as well as the acquired data utilization increased from 60% to more than 99.9%, which overcome the hardware limitations and distinguish neutron and gamma-ray signals, effectively. The developed neutron-gamma discrimination method and the trained neural network can be directly used to other experimental neutrons measurements.PMID:38217939 | DOI:10.1016/j.apradiso.2024.111179

Source: Applied Radiation and Isotopes - January 13, 2024 Category: Radiology Authors: S Y Zhang Z Wei P Q Zhang Q Zhao M Li X H Bai K Wu Y B Nie Y Y Ding J R Wang Y Zhang X D Su Z E Yao Source Type: research