Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A 693 (2012) 203–208

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Nuclear Instruments and Methods in

Physics Research A
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/nima

Development of transportable gamma-ray tomographic system

for industrial application
Jongbum Kim a,n, Sung-hee Jung a, Jinho Moon a, Jang Guen Park a, Joonha Jin a, Gyuseong Cho b
a
Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, Dukjin-dong, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, Republic of Korea
b
Korea advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Guseong-dong, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, Republic of Korea

a r t i c l e i n f o abstract

Article history: This paper introduces a gamma-ray tomographic system which is transportable and can be used for
Received 28 March 2012 on-line systems such as a pipeline operation. In a previous study, a feasibility study on a gamma-ray
Received in revised form tomographic system with a scanning geometry of Electron Beam CT was carried out by Monte Carlo
11 June 2012
simulation. This paper contains a successive work on a previous study by developing and evaluating a
Accepted 15 July 2012
real system. To construct a gamma-ray CT, 137Cs was used as a gamma-ray source and radiation
Available online 2 August 2012
measurement system with 72 channel CsI detectors whose crystal is a 12 mm  12 mm  20 mm
Keywords: rectangular parallelepiped was developed to operate jointly with a motion control system. ML-EM
Transportable system algorithm was used for image reconstruction of experimental data. Using the developed transportable
Gamma-ray
gamma-ray system, laboratory and field experiments were carried out successfully. The field experi-
Computed tomography
ment results show that a gamma-ray CT with an Electron Beam CT scanning geometry can be a
Transmission scan
Industrial plant transportable gantry for objects which are parts of processes.
Crown Copyright & 2012 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction through a Monte Carlo simulation. EB-CT was introduced in the

Gamma-ray has been widely used for industrial process
diagnosis because it has high energy and does not need a
radiation generator [1–3]. There are many examples for gamma-
ray tomography systems for specific applications in the literature
[4–8]. But most of these CT systems were not designed for
outdoor applications. This paper introduces a gamma-ray tomo-
graphic system which is transportable and can be used for on-line
systems such as an operating pipeline. If an object is a part of the
industrial process, a rotating gantry is necessary for a tomography
system. A tomographic system adopting a radiation generator
such as an X-ray is difficult to be downsized as a transportable
system. Gamma-ray CT has a high-energy radiation comparable
to a linear acceleration CT and can be downsized as a transpor-
table system. Although one source-detector parallel beam is light
enough to be a transportable CT, but it takes a long time to
scan [9]. And a fan beam system takes a short time to scan but it is
difficult to construct a rotating gantry for a transportable system.
Regarding a transportable gamma-ray CT, Kim et al. [10] proposed
a source rotating and fixed detection system with a Monte Carlo
simulation and experimental result. In another study, Kim et al.
[11] presented a feasibility study on a gamma-ray tomographic
system with a scanning geometry of an Electron Beam CT (EB-CT)
n
Corresponding author. Tel.: þ82 42 868 8050; fax: þ 82 42 862 6980.
E-mail address: jong@kaeri.re.kr (J. Kim).
medical field more than two decades ago, where it was mainly
used for cardiovascular diagnostics [12]. Later, it was also used to
trace multiphase flows [13]. In EB-CT system, detector array of arc
shape overlapped with the arc shaped target anode ring in
opposite side. The detection systems were fixed and a scanning
electron beam was rapidly swept across an x-ray target using
deflection coils. Thus very fast scanning was possible in these
studies, but their geometry resulted in a heavy and bulky system
because of a complex control system and vacuum tube. Because of
its heavy hardware, electron beam tomography has remained as
indoor equipment. Large portion of the systems are related to the
radiation generating device in electron beam tomography. If
a radiation generating device is replaced by a gamma-ray source,
a tomographic system will have a small size source device. In
addition, a tomographic system with a gamma-ray source can be
designed as transportable system because it does not need
a vacuum guide for an electron beam. There is a lot of need for
a transportable tomographic system in industrial application, but
so far no definitive solution has been created. The inspection of
industrial on-line pipes, wood telephone poles, and cultural assets
are some application areas [4]. This paper is a successive work on
feasibility study from Kim et al. [11]. In this paper, we developed
a transportable gamma-ray tomographic scanner with a scanning
gantry and a radiation measurement system which is the imple-
mentation of the Monte Carlo simulation results from Kim et al.
[11], and presented experimental results on phantom and indus-
trial objects in operation.

0168-9002/$ - see front matter Crown Copyright & 2012 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nima.2012.07.046
204 J. Kim et al. / Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A 693 (2012) 203–208

2. The scanner principle and basic system design
2.1. Geometry and design
EB-CT scanners utilize a semi-circular ring target for a scan-
ning focal point and fixed semi-circular detector arrays [12–13].
This concept has also been applied for the gamma-ray tomo-
graphic system introduced here. In this system, a gamma-ray
source moves along the semi-circular track instead of target ring.
The rotating angle of the gamma-ray source is 256.31, and the
angle of the semi-circular detector array is 2701. Fig. 1 shows
operation principle of gamma-ray tomographic system. The figure
shows the movement of the source on semi-circular track during
the scanning. Fig. 2 shows a 3D drawing of the gamma-ray
tomographic system designed by the concept of an electron beam
CT. Because it is a semi-circular system, a clamping unit can be
used to attach a tomographic scanner to a cylindrical object, as in
Fig. 2. The tomographic scanner is coupled with an object in the
same direction for a detector arc and semi-circular source guide,
where the source position is the starting point. Fig. 3 shows the
overall system setup of the motion control system and radiation
detection system. The pinion drives a semi-circular source track
along the route. The motion control system and radiation mea-
surement system are controlled by a PC with the LABVIEW
program. A 137Cs (185 GBq) is used for a gamma-ray source. The
source, which is 7 mm in diameter and 10 mm long, is contained
in a fan beam collimator made of tungsten. The slit size of the
source collimator is 6 mm in width in the axial direction and the
opening angle of the fan beam is 901. And the total scanning time
is around 15 min for 128 projections and 5 s per projection. With
6 mm slit size for source collimator and a 91 cm distance to
detectors, the count rate was measured as about 5000 counts
per second in air.
data from two multi-channel counters. This configuration results in
72 channel counting system in total. The overall setup of the
measurement system is shown in Fig. 4. The measurement system
for tomography operates jointly with the motion control system.
3. Image reconstruction result
3.1. Image reconstruction process
Data from a non-uniformly distributed projection are generally
considered as being intractable by analytic reconstruction tech-
niques such as filtered back projection [14]. For this reason,
iterative algorithms can be used here. It is known that the EM
algorithm is a suitable iterative algorithm for measuring data
following Poisson distribution [15–17]. In pulse mode gamma-ray
counting system, measurement data follow a Poisson distribution.
In this paper, the EM algorithm is used for image reconstruction
because the measurement data follow a Poisson distribution. In
the study from Kim et al. [11], image reconstruction results of a
Monte Carlo simulation from the proposed gamma CT show that
ML-EM has smaller reconstruction errors among the three algo-
rithms: Algebraic Reconstruction Technique (ART), Total Variation
(TV), and ML-EM. For this reason, the EM algorithm is used for
image reconstruction throughout this paper. ML-EM is one of the
first statistical algorithms that are derived from the likelihood
Clamping device

2.2. Readout electronics

Source
Fig. 4 shows the CsI detector developed for the transportable
tomographic system. The crystal of CsI detector is 12 mm 
12 mm  20 mm rectangular parallelepiped. The CsI detector is
coupled with a PIN diode which is connected to an amplifier and
pulse shaper. For compact design, the amplifier and pulse shaping
circuits were included in a single package. The energy resolutions of
CsI detector are 11.58% and 6.08% for 137Cs (0.662 MeV) and 60Co Object Detector
(1.33 MeV) respectively. Thirty-six sets of CsI detectors are con-
nected to a multi-channel counter. A computer controls and collects Fig. 2. The cad drawing of the transportable gamma ray tomographic scanner.

source
Detector ring
Starting point ending point

β/2
Pinion object
sta cm
)
ble
dju .9
(a = 28

Source movement
R

Fig. 1. Route of source and detector position.

 J. Kim et al. / Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A 693 (2012) 203–208 205

Fig. 3. Overall system setup of a motion control system and radiation detection system.

CsI detector
CsI detector
1~12ch

12 channel Single 12
Channel Analyzer
12

13-24ch
12 12
12 channel Single
Computer Channel Analyzer

37~72
USB 25-36ch
36 channel 12
12 channel Single 12
counters 1~36 Channel Analyzer

Fig. 4. CsI detector and overall measurement system.

function [15]. Since the ML-EM algorithm was developed, many attenuation coefficient:
successive statistical algorithms have been developed. They have PNy ðnÞ ðnÞ
been improved in terms of convergence and computation time. þ 1Þ i ¼ 1 ðM ij N ij Þ
mðn
j
¼ PN ð1Þ
However, the image quality of original ML-EM is still comparable 1=2 i ¼y 1 ðM ðnÞ
ij
þ NðnÞ
ij
Þlij
to that of other successive algorithms. Because the ML-EM
algorithm is well known and many useful references exist, we
Pk1 PN p
will not describe ML-EM in detail. Details on derivation of original  l
j ¼ 1 ij
mðnÞ  ðlij mðnÞ Þ
Mik ¼ Y i þdi e j
di e j ¼ 1 j
ð2Þ
transmission ML-EM algorithm can be referred in [15]. General
understanding of the statistical algorithms including ML-EM can
be referred in [16–17]. For completeness we briefly introduce the Pk PN p
 l
j ¼ 1 ij
mðnÞ  ðlij mðnÞ Þ
final updating equation which was used in computer program- Nik ¼ M ik þ 1 ¼ Y i þ di e j
di e j ¼ 1 j
ð3Þ
ming. Eq. (1) is the updating equation of ML-EM for a transmis-
sion tomography. Here, Mij and Nij are the expected number of
photons entering and exiting the jth pixel in the ith measurement 3.2. Experiment and image reconstruction results
respectively. Mij and Nij are calculated by Eqs. (2) and (3)
respectively. In Eqs. (2) and (3), yi is the measured data in the Tests were performed for three different objects. In the tests,
ith ray, di is the measured data without an object, lij is the beam 137
Cs (740 MBq) was used as the gamma-ray source and the
crossing length in pixel j by the ith beam ray, and mj is linear counting time was 5 s at each projection. The Lower Limit
206 J. Kim et al. / Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A 693 (2012) 203–208
Discriminator (LLD) was set as 550 keV for photo-peak counting.
The source circle radius is 28.9 cm, source rotation angle is
256.341, and detector arc radius is 47.5 cm. In the first experiment
(Experiment 1), phantom made of 16 objects of different sizes
and densities was scanned. Fig. 5(a) shows the geometry of the
phantom for Experiment 1. Fig. 5(b) is a noise free 150  150 pixel
Fig. 5. Phantom measurement with 256 projections: (a) phantom, (b) noise free
digitized image (linear attenuation value, cm  1), and (c) reconstructed image
(linear attenuation value, cm  1).
digitized image for a visual evaluation with the same resolution of
the image reconstruction result. Fig. 5(c) shows the image
reconstruction results for a phantom from the measurement of
256 projections. The results show that the reconstructed value
(linear attenuation value, cm  1) is similar to the real value for PE
and Teflon which are relatively low density material. And the
result also shows the relatively lower value than the real value for
Al and Fe which are relatively in high density material. This
phenomenon is clearly shown in Fig. 6. Fig. 6 shows the profiles of
noise free image and reconstructed images of phantom from gross
counting and photo-peak counting. The profile is obtained from
the slice value along the center horizontal line. Fig. 6 shows that
the results are close to the true value for the photo-peak
measurement and low density materials. It is inferred that the
discrepancy between reconstructed value and true value is due to
scatter radiation. Fig. 6 shows that photo-peak counting is
effective to get more precise results by removing scatter radia-
tion. In a previous work [11], a Monte Carlo simulation and image
reconstruction have been carried out for the phantom and for the
same measurement condition. Experiment 1 is a validation for the
simulation. The experimental result is in good agreement with
the Monte Carlo simulation result.
Gamma-ray CT can have an artifact of blur due to scatter
radiation. It was observed that the image reconstruction region
surrounded by a highly dense material has a shadow image at the
boundary of the dense region in gamma-ray tomography. The
second experiment (Experiment 2) shows a cross-section image
of a pipe which can be found easily at an industrial site. The pipe
is empty and is made of 9 mm thick steel, as shown in Fig. 7(a).
Fig. 7(b) shows the image reconstruction for the pipe. In the
image, a shadow appears at the inner face of the wall and can be
regarded as an artifact. It is inferred that the shadow is stem from
scatter radiation. Due to a limited detector resolution, the scatter
radiation at a low scattering angle cannot be removed sufficiently
by photo-peak counting. Because a pin-hole collimator is difficult
to apply for this scanning geometry, countermeasures should
be considered. Anti-scattering algorithm including pre or post-
processing method should be considered.
As mentioned previously, it is stressed that the tomographic
scanner in this paper is for transportable use. Therefore, field tests
for the system are important. The third experiment was an on-site
demonstration for an industrial pipeline. Fig. 8 shows a cross-
sectional image for an industrial object which consists of 12.7 mm
thick steel pipe, with 193.7 mm inner diameter and 70 mm thick
Fig. 6. Slice profile of reconstructed image of phantom with gross counting and
photo-peak counting.
 J. Kim et al. / Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A 693 (2012) 203–208
Fig. 7. Cross-sectional measurement of an empty steel pipe: (a) geometry of
the pipe, (b) cross-sectional image (linear attenuation value, cm  1), and (c) a
slice view.
HITLIN insulator. HITLIN (High Temperature Layered Insulation) is
an industrial insulating material which is made of glass fiber and
its normal density is about 0.2 g/cm3. The internal state of the
pipe is a vapor phase with mixture of hydrocarbon and hydrogen.
Plant engineers were concerned about forming a coke inside the
pipe. The low density region surrounding the pipe in Fig. 8(b) is
an image for HITLIN insulator. The ring image is a steel pipe wall,
and the area inside the ring is a vapor flow showing a low density
toward the center. From these results, it is inferred that the
process media forms a laminar flow. Because a coke is difficult to
distinguish from a shadow artifact near the inner wall without
207
Fig. 8. Field experiment in a refinery plant: (a) photo of the field test and (b) a
cross-sectional image (linear attenuation value, cm  1).
reference data, an empty pipe of same structure was scanned for
reference data in a laboratory. As a result, it was concluded that
formation of a coke did not occur.
4. Conclusion and future plan
A transportable gamma-ray tomographic system has been
developed to examine an industrial system in operation. Labora-
tory and field experiments with developed tomographic system
have been carried out. The experimental results are in good
agreement with Monte Carlo simulation result from the previous
study [11]. This study shows that a gamma-ray CT with an EB-CT
scanning geometry can be a transportable gantry for objects
which are impossible to separate from the process. At the same
time, problems were also found. Because small scale defect such
as a crack in a wall and thin deposits are difficult to identify with
the current level of resolution of gamma-ray CT systems, a CT
system can only be used for large-scale abnormalities such
blockage and vapor traps. To meet various requirements from
industries, an improvement of resolution is necessary. The devel-
opment of a small pitch array detector can be a fundamental
solution for high resolution. As an example of case studies on a
high-resolution gamma-ray CT, Bieberle et al. [18] have intro-
duced a 2 mm resolution gamma-ray detector module, and
Hampel et al. [19] have applied the system for the measurement
208 J. Kim et al. / Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A 693 (2012) 203–208

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