Patent ID: 7595473

Claim:
A method of detecting the presence of at least one target analyte in at least a first and a second sample comprising: contacting said first sample with a sensor array comprising a plurality of sensor element types and a plurality of sensor elements of each sensor element type; defining a first section of said sensor array and a second section of said sensor array which is non-overlapping with said first section, wherein each of said first and second sections contains a distribution of sensor elements of each sensor element type that is substantially the same as an overall distribution of the sensor elements of each sensor element type for the entire sensor array; illuminating said first section of said sensor array with a first intensity and collecting a first set of data; contacting said second sample with said sensor array and with at least a portion of said sensor elements; illuminating said second section of said sensor array with a second intensity different from said first intensity and collecting a second set of data; and during at least one point during performance of the method, determining the presence or absence of said target analyte.