Reconfigurable hardware to radionuclide identification using subtractive clustering

Abstract

Radioactivity is the spontaneous emission of energy from unstable atoms. Radioactive sources have radionuclides. Radionuclide undergoes radioactive decay and emits gamma rays and subatomic particles, constituting the ionizing radiation. The gamma ray energy of a radionuclide is used to determine the identity of gamma emitters present in the source. This paper describes the hardware implementation of subtractive clustering algorithm to perform radionuclide identification. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.