The material absorbing the radiation can be human tissue or silicon microchips or any other medium. In health physics whole body counting refers to the measurement of radioactivity within the human body. Setting the scale is a must for meters with analog. Papers read at a conference held at leeds on april 16 17 1956. The curie ci and the becquerel bq are the units of radioactivity. One rad is 100 ergsgram in other words 100 ergs of energy absorbed by one gram of a given body tissue.
Suppose youre measuring radioactivity and take a reading of 100 cpm. The rad or the gray are used to measure radiation a person takes in and the rem or the sievert are used to understand how much risk people have by being around a source of radiation. The measurement of body radioactivity. Alpha particle decays can also be detected indirectly by their coincident gamma radiation. It has been replaced by the gray in si derived units but is still used in the united states though strongly discouraged in chapter 52 of style guide for us. A radioactive substance can be selectively taken up by different organs or tissue.
The biological risk of exposure to radiation is measured using the conventional unit rem or the si unit sievert sv. Many radiation monitors measure exposure. Measuring radioactive doses dosimetry is the measurement of ionizing radiation in a given place or on a person which is called individual dosimetry. This is defined as the energy imparted to a defined mass of tissue. As a radioprotection tool its purpose is to provide an estimate of quantities such as the equivalent dose or the effective dose resulting from exposure during a certain amount of time. The rad is a unit of absorbed radiation dose defined as 1 rad 001 gy 001 jkg.
Radiation doses are often calculated in the units of rad short for radiation absorbeddose. National institute of standa. The curie is equal to 3710 10 disintegrations per second. Get this from a library. The units for exposure are the roentgen r and coulombkilogram ckg. This is a count of radioactive incidents regardless of the type of radiation.
In certain circumstances beta emitters can be measured but with degraded sensitivity. The radiation dose absorbed by a person that is the amount of energy deposited in human tissue by radiation is measured using the conventional unit rad or the si unit gray gy. Dose is generally not uniform over the body. It was originally defined in cgs units in 1953 as the dose causing 100 ergs of energy to be absorbed by one gram of matter. E xposure describes the amount of radiation traveling through the air. The technique is primarily applicable to radioactive material that emits gamma rays.
Analog devices that measure radioactivity display a scale of counts per minute in intervals of 100. British institute of radiology incorporated with the röntgen society. The becquerel is the si unit of radioactive activity and is defined as 1 disintegration per second. The curie or the becquerel are used as units of measurement when youre looking at how much radiation a material is giving off. If the scale is set to x10 instead of x1 the. The units of measure for radioactivity are the curie ci and becquerel bq.