BACKGROUND Spatial outbreak detection algorithms using routinely collected healthcare data have been developed since the late 90s to identify and locate disease outbreaks. However, current well-received spatial algorithms assume only one outbreak cluster present at the same point of time which may not be valid during a pandemic when several clusters of geographic areas concurrently occur. Based...

Silicon avalanche photodiodes operated above breakdown, in Geiger mode, can be sensitive enough to allow single photon detection. An inherent limit to GMAPD sensitivity is the noise caused by thermally generated carriers. This noise manifests itself as extraneous counts in the absence of light and is termed the dark count. The presence of the dark count in GM-APD detectors reduces the signal to...

When a photon is detected by a Geiger-mode avalanche photo-diode (GMAPD), the detector is rendered inactive, or blocked, for a certain period of time. In this paper we derive the blocking probability for a GMAPD whose input is either an unmodulated, Bernoulli modulated or pulse-position-modulated (PPM) Poisson process. We demonstrate how the PPM and Bernoulli cases differ, illustrating that the...