Use of thermal neutrons to perform clinical analyses in blood and urine samples

Abstract

In the Realth field it is usual to perform clinical examination in blood and urine samples to identify anomalies in organs. These analyses aim to observe if there are changes associated to the measured concentrations of elements in biological samples; all these conventional analysis techniques, though, are very expensive and need large samples of the biological materials, 2 to 5ml for each examination. In this study we show that the Absolute Neutron Activation Analysis technique can be used to perform clinical analyses, with many advantages towards the traditional method. For this purpose, the Cadmium Ratio technique was used for the measurement of thermal flux distribution and the concentrations of elements in the biological samples were obtained. In comparison to the conventional techniques, it is an alternative method for the diagnostic of anomalies in organs that uses smaller quantities of the samples (~200pl); it also allows the simultaneous evaluation of several elements’ concentrations in the biological samples at once, something not always possible in the conventional clinical analysis. Another important advantage, it eliminates the need to use standard material, thus making the analyzing process agile, practical and also economic in researches that involves clinical evaluation of small animals (rats, poultry, rabbits, etc).