ABSTRACT
CONTENTS 7.1 Signals, Detection, and Measurement ........................................................................... 169 7.2 Specificity ........................................................................................................................... 170 7.3 Signal-to-Noise Ratio........................................................................................................ 171 7.4 Detection Criteria.............................................................................................................. 173 7.5 Equilibrium Noise ............................................................................................................ 173 7.6 Nonequilibrium Noise ..................................................................................................... 180 7.7 Chemical Noise ................................................................................................................. 190 7.8 Interpretation of Experiments......................................................................................... 195 Acknowledgment....................................................................................................................... 196 References ................................................................................................................................... 196
Measurement is a quantitative observation and well known to be of great importance to science. However, measurements involving biological systems are complicated by the complexity of cells and tissues, particularly if fields are expected to interact weakly and field-induced changes are found to be small. Some key parameters, for example, temperature coefficient of a measured quantity, may be inadequately characterized, and related quantities may be determined incompletely (e.g., measurement or modeling of the time-dependent temperature throughout the volume of the biological system being studied). Detection is a special case of measurement, that is, the measurement is so coarse that an observer can only distinguish between ‘‘signal’’ and ‘‘no signal.’’
