We present a method for material classifications in spectral X-ray Computed Tomography (SCT) taking advantage of energy-resolving 2D detectors to simultaneously extract the energy dependence of a material's linear attenuation coefficient (LAC). The method employs an attenuation decomposition presented by Alvarez et al., and estimates system-independent material properties of electron density (e) and effective atomic number (ef f), independent of the scanner, from the energy-dependent LAC measurements. The method uses a spectral correction algorithm and the energy range is truncated to exclude bins with photon starvation and spectral distortion present even after correction of detector response. A novel technique of energy bin selection is used for optimized classification performance. The method is tested against another SCT classification method called SRZE for inspecting materials in the range of 6 ≤ ef f ≤ 23. Our method aims at an increase in the speed of pot processing workflow after the data acquisition, and it achieves explicitly up to 32 times better time efficiency for the reconstruction with comparable accuracy for a range of materials important in threat detection.
The Nuclear Physics oriented pillar of the pan-European Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI-NP) will host an ultra-bright, energy tunable, and quasi-monochromatic gamma-ray beam system in the range of 0.2-19.5 MeV produced by laser Compton backscattering. This gamma beam satisfies the criteria for large-size product investigations with added capabilities like isotope detection through the use of nuclear resonance fluorescence (NRF) and is ideal for non-destructive testing applications. Two major applications of gamma beams are being envisaged at ELI-NP: industrial applications based on NRF and industrial radiography and tomography. Both applications exploit the unique characteristics of the gamma beam to deliver new opportunities for the industry. Here, we present the experimental setups proposed at ELI-NP and discuss their performance based on analytical calculations and GEANT4 numerical simulations. One of the main advantages of using the gamma beam at ELI-NP for applications based on NRF is the availability of an advanced detector array, which can enhance the advantages already provided by the high quality of the gamma beam.
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