A method for performance assessment of medical radioisotope equipment

A variety of tests and procedures exist for the performance assessment of radioisotope diagnostic equipment. The complex performance index which has been introduced to date is based on an heuristic approach. The present work tries to interconnect algorithmically the most important factors as the influence of the measurement geometry, the statistic peculiarities for lower activities and the information loss at high count rates. All this is reflected in a criterion which integrates the spatial resolution, the effective detector's field of vision, the radionuclide's sensitivity, the background count rate and the effective dead-time of the system under investigation. (Auth.)