Low dose data

The average of the background counts per pixel are printed in INIT.LP, or can be estimated by visualizing the frames with XDS-Viewer or adxv.

In XDS, the background of a data frame is used for scaling adjacent frames relative to each other in the INTEGRATE step.

This seems to work well down to an average of 0.05 counts/pixel. If, however, the crystal is exposed so shortly/weakly that the average drops significantly below this value, scaling becomes impossible - the ratio of averages which are around zero is obviously undefined. The keyword DATA_RANGE_FIXED_SCALE_FACTOR has been introduced to handle this situation.

See also: Difficult datasets