A system for on-line monitoring of light element concentration distributions in thin samples

At the Cyclotron Laboratory, a scanning proton microprobe is used to determ ine concentration distributions in biomedical samples. The data acquired in these measurements used to be analysed in a time consuming off-line analys is. To avoid the loss of valuable measurement and analysis time, DYANA was developed. DYANA is an on-line method for the analysis of data from biomedi cal measurements, fly using a database of background shapes, light elements such as Na and Mg, can be fitted even more precisely than in conventional fitting procedures. The entire analysis takes only several seconds and is p erformed while the acquisition system is gathering a new subset of data. Da ta acquisition must be guaranteed and may not be interfered by other parall el processes. Therefore, the analysis, the data acquisition and the experim ent control is performed on a PCI-based Pentium personal computer (PC), run ning a real-time operating system. A second PC is added to run a graphical user interface for interaction with the experimenter and the monitoring of the analysed results. The system is here illustrated using atherosclerotic tissue but is applicable to all kinds of thin samples. (C) 1999 Elsevier Sc ience B.V. All rights reserved.