ORTEC RECEIVES PATENT FOR IMPROVED
DEAD-TIME CORRECTION TECHNIQUE

Oak Ridge, TN, January 30, 2002 – Advanced Measurement Technology, Inc. today announced ORTEC Receives Patent for Improved Dead-time Correction Technique – Enhancement provides valuable improvements to accuracy in gamma-ray spectrometry.

ORTEC Spectroscopy products granted patent for implementation of Zero Dead Time (ZDT™) loss-free counting correction. (Patent Number 6,327,549).

The ORTEC DSPEC^PLUS™ is the first instrument to utilize a completely digital "zero dead-time" (ZDT) method for loss free counting that is fully automatic and also gives the uncertainty for each channel in the corrected spectrum. The innovative technology in this method allows ZDT to be used in any spectroscopy system by operators of any experience level. The time saved and improved data integrity that can be achieved through use of the ZDT method has significant benefits for radiochemical and process-monitoring spectroscopy systems.

All Gamma-ray spectroscopy systems suffer from dead-time related data losses at high data rates. The traditional methods, which simply extend the acquisition time to allow for lost data, are inaccurate when the sample has varying data rates.

The more recent dynamic methods, which correct the data in "real time", and thus solve the problem of varying count rates, are unable to calculate the uncertainty on the corrected spectral data.

The patented ZDT method for the first time enables the spectroscopy system to dynamically correct the spectral data for losses, while maintaining a variance spectrum from which the uncertainty in the corrected spectrum is easily and accurately obtained.