Ionizing radiation is ubiquitous in the environment. Its source can be natural, such as radioactive materials present in soil and cosmic rays, or artificial, such as the fuel for nuclear power plants. Overexposure to ionizing radiation may damage living tissue and could cause severe health problems (i.e., mutations, radiation sickness, cancer, and death). Cytogenetic bio-dosimetry has the great advantage to take into account the inter-individual variation, and it is informative even when physical dosimetry is not applicable; moreover, it is the definitive method to assess exposure to ionizing radiation recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO). Such a procedure involves counting the frequency of dicentric chromosomes (DCs), which are the most studied chromosomal aberrations used as absorbed radiation biomarkers, during the metaphase of cells. A set of algorithms, tested on different programming languages to automatically identify DCs, is analyzed by the authors together with an Automated Dicentric Chromosome Identifying software (ADCI) mostly based on OpenCV programming libraries. The purpose of this work is to review the main results regarding the correlation between ionizing radiation and dicentric chromosomes in cytogenetic bio-dosimetry.

电离辐射在环境中无处不在。它的来源可以是天然的，例如土壤和宇宙射线中存在的放射性物质，也可以是人造的，例如核电站的燃料。过度暴露于电离辐射下可能会损坏生物组织，并可能导致严重的健康问题（例如，突变，放射病，癌症和死亡）。细胞遗传学的生物剂量测定法具有考虑个体间差异的巨大优势，即使不适用物理剂量测定法也能提供有益的信息。此外，这是评估世界卫生组织（WHO）建议的暴露于电离辐射的确定性方法。这种程序涉及对双着丝粒（DC）的频率进行计数，这是研究最多的用作吸收辐射生物标记物的染色体畸变，在细胞中期。作者与主要基于OpenCV编程库的自动双中心染色体识别软件（ADCI）一起分析了在不同编程语言上测试的一组算法，以自动识别DC。这项工作的目的是审查有关细胞遗传学生物剂量学中电离辐射与双着丝粒染色体之间相关性的主要结果。