Development of a Lightweight Tungsten Shielding Fiber That Can Be Used for Improving the Performance of Medical Radiation Shields
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript under review deals with very important issue related to decrease in weight of shielding keeping reasonable attenuation. Thus it worth to be published after some minor comments will get an answers.
1. It would be useful to include schematic drawing showing main differences of the weaving technique used to manufacture investigated fabric.
2. What do you mean as the "effective energy"? How do you determine it?
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
In this study, the shielding performance of shielding fabrics woven by winding polyethylene (PE) yarn around a 30 μm tungsten wire was evaluated. To improve the shielding performance, an air pressure dispersion process of coating tungsten nanopowder on the fiber was developed. The radiation shielding effectiveness of the shielding fibers with and without dispersed tungsten nanopowder were compared by measuring the spatial dose inside the diagnostic X-ray imaging
room of a medical institution. The results of the experiment confirmed that the fabric coated with
tungsten nanopowder improved the shielding performance of the general tungsten fiber by approximately 15 % and provided relatively effective low-dose radiation shielding at approximately 1.2 m 18 of the X-ray imaging equipment.
The paper’s subject is very practical and interesting. The research procedure has been logically carried out and includes experimental work. Therefore, I highly recommend this paper for publication in this journal but before that, I have some few comments on the text:
Comments:
1)I would suggest the author to rewrite the title in a better form. For example: “Development of lightweight tungsten shielding fiber that can be used for improving the performance of medical radiation shields”.
2)The author must discuss the results shown in Table2 with more details. For example, it should be discussed that the shield performance is related to Effective X-ray energy or not. Compare the results of Tungsten fiber and Tungsten Powder fiber)
3)In page 4 line 136: This sentence “The HVL means a thickness that becomes ?0/2.” should be rewritten in this way: “The HVL, is the thickness of the material at which the intensity of radiation entering it is reduced by one half (?0/2)”
4)Font size of equation 1 and 2 don’t correspond to the text font size (specially equation 2).
5)The white color texts on figure 4 can not be seen well. Please change the color of text or write them besides of figure.
6)Please explain in table 2 (or somewhere in the text) which exposure parameters (x-ray tube voltage, current, time of exposure, etc.) have been used in the experiments.
7)Did you consider the photon scattering effects in your experiments? The scattered photons from around medium (which are not related to sample sheet) can have effect on the measured dose in the dosimeter.
8) Recently, artificial intelligence has been widely used for optimizing the radiation based systems and has some advantages over traditional methods. I recommend the authors to add some references in the paper in field of application of artificial intelligence for optimizing the photon radiation based systems both in field of medical and industry. Some suitable and new references are listed in the following:
[1]Takam, C.A., Samba, O., Kouanou, A.T. and Tchiotsop, D., 2020. Spark Architecture for deep learning-based dose optimization in medical imaging. Informatics in Medicine Unlocked, p.100335.
[2] Roshani, M., Phan, G.T., Ali, P.J.M., Roshani, G.H., Hanus, R., Duong, 2021. Evaluation of flow pattern recognition and void fraction measurement in two phase flow independent of oil pipeline’s scale layer thickness. Alexandria Engineering Journal.
[3] Roshani, G.H.; Roshani, S.. Online measuring density of oil products in annular regime of gas-liquid two phase flows. Measurement 2018, 129, 296–301.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The manuscript (applsci-1291697) entitled "Development of lightweight tungsten shielding fiber that can be used in medical institutions and improvement of shielding performance" presents the development and manufacture of a light and flexible fabric that could significantly reduce the scattered radiation dose received by professionally exposed workers and also to protect some areas of patients in medical radiodiagnosis procedures against scattered radiation. This constitutes a current topic of great interest to all Radiation Diagnostics and Radiation Protection workers.
Major Considerations
The author describe that the use of this new textile material Tungsten Powder fiber could reach a Shielding Rate of 14-32% of the exposure dose under the conditions in which they have been tested (2 m FOD, 80 kV and 30 mAs) discussing the advantages that this material presents with respect to textiles commonly used in operational radiological protection in medical radiodiagnosis facilities.
The results presented in the manuscript do not show a significant reduction in the radiation dose of the studied material compared to the materials currently used in these radiodiagnostic applications. The manuscript does not present any comparative analysis with these materials. The reduction described is negligible from the point of view of the radiological protection of people subjected to scattered radiation in radiodiagnostic applications.
In my opinion there are two ways to establish the comparison between these materials:
1.- Using the Gold standard for homogenization of results, comparing them with the protection in mm of lead equivalent. The lead equivalent shall be determined as described in the IEC 61331-1 Standard, using the reverse wide beam geometry method for the specified range of radiation qualities of 50 kV, 70 kV, 90 kV and 110 kV, according to the section 5.5 of the IEC 61331-1 Standard. 22. Protective aprons and thyroid collars are used for protection against diffuse radiation and are tested in the tube voltage range of 50 kV to 110 kV. However, these devices and materials are useful for the diffuse radiation of primary X-ray beams with tube voltages of 60 kV to 120kV since their diffuse spectrum coincides with that of the primary beams that have tube voltages of 10 kV
2.- If the above is not possible, by comparing it with the mandatory personal protective garments available in radiography rooms. The author should present his results comparing them with the results obtained with any type of personal protection material (apron, collar or radiological protective gloves) under the same experimental conditions, which would really show the X-ray protection capacity of this new type of material.
However, the dose reduction produced by the new textile material is shown in Table 2. Indeed, the interposition of this material between the radiation emitting focus and the radiation detector used shows a Shielding Rate between 14.6-32.6% when the material that we usually use ranges between 92% and 99% reduction using mA and kV higher than those used by the author in this study.
In Radiation Protection, to evaluate the protection capacity of a personal protection material, the Protection Factor / Protection Magnitude (MP) obtained by the formula is used: MP = determined radiation dose in front of the protection material / determined radiation dose behind the protective material in the conditions deemed appropriate. The current protection materials with equivalents of 0.25 mm of Pb or 0.50 mm of Pb show a PM that oscillates between 100-250 being a dimensionless unit; but what it expresses is the number of exposures that must be carried out protected with that protective material (100-250 exposures) to be irradiated with the same dose caused by a single exposure without exposure material.
If we apply this magnitude of Protection to the results presented in the manuscript, we obtain the following table:
|
keV |
Nothing |
Tungsten Power fibrer |
MP |
|
24.6 |
106.90 |
55.49 |
1.9 |
|
28.7 |
381.83 |
231.27 |
1.6 |
|
32.5 |
799.70 |
545.80 |
1.4 |
|
48.5 |
1318,33 |
984.00 |
1.3 |
|
54.9 |
1648.33 |
1312.67 |
1.2 |
While the material that we currently use in radiodiagnosis with an equivalence of 0.25-0.50 mm of lead provides a protection magnitude of 100-250 at 70-80 kV, the new tissue tested is only 1.94 and gradually decreases as the kV increases slightly. It is possible to predict that at kV of 70-80 kV the MP is 1, which expresses that under these conditions the tested material does not present any protection capacity for the personnel who use it. That is, in front of the material the same dose is received as behind the material tested.
Minor considerations:
- The choice of such a low mAs should be explained in the discussion.
- Clarify in Material and Methods the results shown in Table 2.
- Figure 4 could be improved.
- Figure 7 does not provide additional information to that described in the text and should be eliminated.
- In the Disccussion section, the professionally exposed worker's ability to choose to achieve a lower weight load and flexibility proposed by this material should be reflected in the face of the loss of most of the reduction to the radiation dose to which he is exposed
- the paragraph should be rewritten according to the previous considerations (lines 219-224).
- the results should contain a decimal
- the conclusion should be rewritten
- the title could be reconsidered
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
All the comments have been addressed correctly and the paper in the present form is ready for publication.
Reviewer 3 Report
The revision carried out has substantially improved the manuscript. In my opinion, it would have been desirable to compare this new material with protective clothing used to protect against scattered radiation in medical radiodiagnosis rooms today. Its ability to protect against scattered radiation in the situations described in the manuscript is very small.
