7. Conclusion

Since the 1990s, DQE has become a quality factor for any digital X-ray detector designed for medical imaging. It's a tricky parameter to measure, and its interpretation isn't always obvious to the user, but there's no doubt that it represents the best possible quantification of a detector's performance, when other equipment characteristics are not taken into account.

Nevertheless, since the mid-1990s, engineers have been seeking to quantify the influence of the environment: that of the equipment through the X-ray source, the anti-diffusion grid, but also the influence of the nature of the examination (orthopedics, angiography, patient corpulence, etc. – we can then introduce the notion of contrast, absent from this article), and also that of the mental process of reading the image by the radiologist. A more general theory has been developed for this purpose, which...