Dan Lingenfelter
Graduate student
E-mail: danling@umich.edu
Phone:
Graduated with Ph.D.
Dan is currently working on asymptotic approximations for predicting detection performance with gamma-ray imaging systems. Detection performance is commonly measured by the receiver operating characteristic (ROC), which is the probability of detection as a function of the probability of false alarm. Ideally, a detector would have a large probability of detection and a small probability of false alarm. It is difficult to compute the ROC for position-sensitive gamma-ray imaging systems empirically because of the need for large amounts of data and computation. Asymptotic approximations allow computation of the ROC with less data and computation than empirical methods. Dan’s work showed that asymptotic approximations can be accurate when the number of received photons is not extremely small. The asymptotic approximations also account for model mismatch, which is a common problem with position-sensitive gamma-ray detectors due to approximations made in system modeling. Dan is currently applying the theory of asymptotic approximation using real data from the Polaris system.