Android application for parsing X-ray absorption coefficients web database

Abstract

We focus on developing a standalone android application module to parse web databases and text files. The application is capable of retrieving and visualizing the data from NIST and similar web databases as well as from the text files stored locally on a phone storage device. The data is represented by the X-ray mass attenuation and absorption coefficients for all elements from the periodic table and other complex compounds acquired for the range of X-ray photons energies. Upon retrieving, parsing, and conversion the data is fully ready for visualization or, as originally designed, to be supplied for further simulation of the computed tomography experiment in multiple formats. The application is useful as a simple, open-source Java code, collection of methods to organize the access and parsing of the locally and remotely stored data in the text formats in the nuclear physic numerical experiment. In the application, a separate thread was dedicated to data retrieval and analysis. This thread is hosted by a fragment to provide the survival of calculations during the application’s configuration changes. It also facilitates unrestricted internet access otherwise prohibited on the main UI thread. The results of parsing and calculations in the concurrent thread were linked to the main thread with the ProgressUpdate callback function.