The role of the quantum efficiency on the DQE of an imaging detector

The quantum efficiency (QE) is unsuitable to characterise the performance of an imaging detector. Instead, the detective quantum efficiency (DQE), which indicates how much the detection process deteriorates the signal-to-noise ratio of the input image, is a more convenient parameter. Nevertheless QE plays a relevant role in the DQE formulation, as we have shown in the present paper, which is intended as a continuation and improvement of a previous paper of the same authors.