Precise prediction of radiation interaction position in plastic rod scintillators using a fast and simple technique: Artificial neural network

Precise prediction of the radiation interaction position in scintillators plays an important role in medical and industrial imaging systems. In this research, the incident position of the gamma rays was predicted precisely in a plastic rod scintillator by using attenuation technique and multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network, for the first time. Also, this procedure was performed using nonlinear regression (NLR) method. The experimental setup is comprised of a plastic rod scintillator (BC400) coupled with two PMTs at two sides, a 60Co gamma source and two counters that record count rates. Using two proposed techniques (ANN and NLR), the radiation interaction position was predicted in a plastic rod scintillator with a mean relative error percentage less than 4.6% and 14.6%, respectively. The mean absolute error was measured less than 2.5 and 5.5. The correlation coefficient was calculated 0.998 and 0.984, respectively. Also, the ANN technique was confirmed by leave-one-out (LOO) method with 1% error. These results presented the superiority of the ANN method in comparison with NLR and the other methods. The technique and set up used are simpler and faster than other the previous position sensitive detectors. Thus, the time, cost and shielding and electronics requirements are minimized and optimized. Keywords: Radiation interaction position, Plastic rod scintillator, Position sensitive detector, Artificial neural network, Nonlinear regression