An Operational Approach to Scoring Radiation Detector Identification Results

Human portable radiation detection systems are important tools used by the first responder and law enforcement community in the preventive radiological and nuclear (rad/nuc) detection mission. Many different detection and identification systems are available commercially and others have been or are being developed to meet government needs. For users to select the best system for their mission, a comparison of the performance of each system is needed. The comparison approach must simultaneously have enough granularity to distinguish important performance differences and be simple to interpret. Previous approaches have only considered technical performance. However, operational performance factors such as false alarm frequency, or “wrong” instrument responses which elicit the same operational response as the “right” answer are important as well. The new scoring approach presented here, simultaneously considers technical performance while factoring in operational factors which rely on an entity’s concept of operations. Recent identification results from human portable radiation detection systems will be used to illustrate this approach.