Introduction
Poisson distribution is generally assumed to be the statistical law
that governs the statistics of radioactive decays and as such it is
widely used in nuclear medicine to describe decays of radiotracers.
Consequently, in the majority of medical physics texts that
discuss the statistics of radioactive decay, the Poisson distribution
formula is used to estimate the number of nuclei that will decay
over some fixed time assuming some fixed amount of radioisotope
in a sample. For example, according to the definition in [1] the
number of decays N in a sample of radioactive material follows the
Poisson distribution such that
p N
N e
N
N N
( )=
−
!
where: p(N) is the probability of N decays and N is the mean of the
number of decays that would be obtained if identical experiments