EVERYDAY SCIENCE

Detailed explanation-1: -Sensitivity. The ability to demonstrate that two samples have different amounts of analyte is an essential part of many analyses. A method’s sensitivity is a measure of its ability to establish that such a difference is significant.

Detailed explanation-2: -"Analytical sensitivity” represents the smallest amount of substance in a sample that can accurately be measured by an assay. “Analytical specificity” refers to the ability of an assay to measure on particular organism or substance, rather than others, in a sample.

Detailed explanation-3: -Analytical sensitivity is often referred to as the limit of detection (LoD). LoD is the actual concentration of an analyte in a specimen that can be consistently detected ≥ 95% of the time. The LoD may be represented as the number of genome copies, infectious dose, colony-forming units, plaque forming units, etc.

Detailed explanation-4: -Sensitivity refers to a radar detector’s ability to pick up police signals at the greatest distance. Selectivity refers to the detector’s ability to filter out signals that are not true police signals, yet operate on the same frequencies as police radar (i.e. security alarms, garage doors, automatic doors, etc.).

Detailed explanation-5: -Selectivity/specificity. Selectivity of an analytical method is its ability to measure accurately an analyte in the presence of interferences that may be expected to be present in the sample matrix.