Patent 8937282 was granted and assigned to FEI Company on January, 2015 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
An improved mineral analysis system includes mineral definitions that include not only characteristics of the minerals, but also variability in those characteristics. The variabilities allow the calculation of ranges of expected values for different quality of measurements, for example, for different numbers of x-ray counts. Match probabilities can therefore be calculated to more accurately determine the composition of a mineral sample.