ABSTRACT
Commercial manufacturers have produced a range of instrumentation for the measurement of radioactivity. The fundamentals of the methodology have therefore become entwined with the instrumentation. In addition to scintillation counting other technological developments have been made in the field of radiodetection and this chapter provides a general review of the methods and instrumentation available. It presents the general principles of flow detection. As always in scientific endeavor, the lowest detection levels are demanded from scintillation counting and instrument manufacturers have constantly strived to develop products with improved sensitivity. As with all scintillation counting, the reduction of background is an important consideration in the design of instrumentation and efforts have been made to reduce the background of flow counters to improve their sensitivity. As with any analytical instrumentation, the lower the background, the better the signal to noise and the better the sensitivity.
