‘TLDetect’: AI-Based Application for Detection and Correction of Anomalous TLD Glow Curves

This research reviews a novel artificial intelligence (AI)-based application called TLDetect, which filters and classifies anomalous glow curves (GCs) of thermoluminescent dosimeters (TLDs). Until recently, GC review and correction in the lab were performed using an old in-house software, which uses the Microsoft Access database and allows the laboratory technician to manually review and correct almost all GCs without any filtering. The newly developed application TLDetect uses a modern SQL database and filters out only the necessary GCs for technician review. TLDetect first uses an artificial neural network (ANN) model to filter out all regular GCs. Afterwards, it automatically classifies the rest of the GCs into five different anomaly classes. These five classes are defined by the typical patterns of GCs, i.e., high noise at either low or high temperature channels, untypical GC width (either wide or narrow), shifted GCs whether to the low or to the high temperatures, spikes, and a last class that contains all other unclassified anomalies. By this automatic filtering and classification, the algorithm substantially reduces the amount of the technician's time spent reviewing the GCs and makes the external dosimetry laboratory dose assessment process more repeatable, more accurate, and faster. Moreover, a database of the class anomalies distribution over time of GCs is saved along with all their relevant statistics, which can later assist with preliminary diagnosis of TLD reader hardware issues.