Surrogate distributed radiological sources III: quantitative distributed source reconstructions

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that aerial gamma-ray measurements combined with advanced reconstruction techniques can accurately quantify and image distributed radiological sources, improving scene data fusion methods.

Contribution

It introduces quantitative reconstruction methods for distributed gamma-ray sources using aerial measurements, with comprehensive analysis of performance factors and validation of surrogate source utility.

Findings

Accurate shape and activity reconstruction of distributed sources.

Performance dependence on measurement parameters like altitude and spacing.

Validation of point source arrays as surrogates for real sources.

Abstract

In this third part of a multi-paper series, we present quantitative image reconstruction results from aerial measurements of eight different surrogate distributed gamma-ray sources on flat terrain. We show that our quantitative imaging methods can accurately reconstruct the expected shapes, and, after appropriate calibration, the absolute activity of the distributed sources. We conduct several studies of imaging performance versus various measurement and reconstruction parameters, including detector altitude and raster pass spacing, data and modeling fidelity, and regularization type and strength. The imaging quality performance is quantified using various quantitative image quality metrics. Our results confirm the utility of point source arrays as surrogates for truly distributed radiological sources, and advance the quantitative capabilities of Scene Data Fusion gamma-ray imaging methods.