Reconstruction of Compton Edges in Plastic Gamma Spectra Using Deep Autoencoder

Abstract

Plastic scintillation detectors are widely utilized in radiation measurement because of their unique characteristics. However, they are generally used for counting applications because of the energy broadening effect and the absence of a photo peak in their spectra. To overcome their weaknesses, many studies on pseudo spectroscopy have been reported, but most of them have not been able to directly identify the energy of incident gamma rays. In this paper, we propose a method to reconstruct Compton edges in plastic gamma spectra using an artificial neural network for direct pseudo gamma spectroscopy. Spectra simulated using MCNP 6.2 software were used to generate training and validation sets. Our model was trained to reconstruct Compton edges in plastic gamma spectra. In addition, we aimed for our model to be capable of reconstructing Compton edges even for spectra having poor counting statistics by designing a dataset generation procedure. Minimum reconstructible counts for single isotopes were evaluated with metric of mean averaged percentage error as 650 for ⁶⁰Co, 2000 for ¹³⁷Cs, 3050 for ²²Na, and 3750 for ¹³³Ba. The performance of our model was verified using the simulated spectra measured by a PVT detector. Although our model was trained using simulation data only, it successfully reconstructed Compton edges even in measured gamma spectra with poor counting statistics.