MAXIMUM LIKELIHOOD ESTIMATION USING EXPECTATION MAXIMIZATION APPLIED TO AMBIENT DOSE EQUIVALENT MEASUREMENTS.

Abstract

The use of spectrometric detectors for ambient dose equivalent measurements requires the development of calculation procedures to obtain the incident photon fluence spectra from the measured pulse-height spectra. In this work, the implementation of a methodology based on the maximum likelihood estimation using expectation maximization is described. The method has been validated using simulated and reference photon beams. The results are in excellent agreement with the reference values in the framework of the involved uncertainties. The presented method allows the consideration of the detector resolution, improving thus the energy resolution of the obtained incident photon spectra.