Computer Based Plutonium Wound Monitor

A new plutonium wound monitor has been developed at Los Alamos to upgrade a system which has been in use for about five years.1 The instrument, called a Computerized Wound Screening System, is designed around a readily available personal computer. It includes a full-function 256-channel pulse height analyzer and software necessary to calculate plutonium and americium activity from a spectrum. This new system provides medical and health physics personnel with considerable flexibilty in recognizing and recording situations where a wound incurred in a plutonium processing facility might be contaminated. This flexibility includes fast, accurate determination of contaminants in a wound, hard copy printout of results, and full patient logging capabilities via flexible disk storage. Use of a low cost computer greatly simplifies hardware and software design, and makes duplication of the instrument very simple and inexpensive.