Hello everyone,
I did some research of how to measure with IVIS and which opportunities I have... I found lots of advantages for the unit photons per second but u can also use counts per second as a unit. so I was wondering when should I use counts and when photons per second? can anyone help?
Dear Anabel,
counts per second is what your detector delivers, but the unit contains no information on the actual cause of the counts. In practice, you always have "false" counts, for example caused by noise or by light from the environment. Photons per second is what you want to measure- but how can you be sure photons being the cause of any signal from your detector? You see, I hope, that with “counts per second” you are on the save side. But in most cases there is no difference between the units, provided you have taken care that the number of “false” counts is small compared to the true signals.
Good luck with your work
Max
Another aspect: if several photons are simultaneously received in the detector, they are not counted separately, but such a signal may be rejected by the discriminator. So, “counts per second” is determined also by the features of the processing algorithm.
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