June 2012 IHS Jane's Airport Review features article on the Advanced Photonix Anomaly Detection System

The June 2012, Jane's Airport Security and Safety Review, http://jar.janes.com/public/jar/safety.shtml features an interesting article written by Barry Cross, and Ben Vogel, about both the Advanced Photonix (API), Anomaly Detection System, as well as a discussion of the work by the French Government through it's CEA-Leti, program to employ terahertz scanning systems to fill current security gaps in airport screening, to prevent terrorists efforts to bring weapons, bombs, or toxic chemical or biological devices onto airplanes or other public places or events. The present API system alerts or registers a "threat" or "no-threat", but in the future will most likely include a classification of the type of threat.
Irl Duling, director of terahertz business development for API, noted that the anomaly detection system will allow TSA security personnel to discontinue the practice of physically "patting-down" passengers after initial scanning by threshold airport security systems reveals an anomaly on the person's body, which might be a concealed object, (or simply a person wearing  religious headgear which can't be removed.)
The system's terahertz pulse which covers a wide bandwidth from 20 GHz, to almost 4 THz, and is capable of detecting a wide range of chemical or biological signatures, which it then compares against the library of spectroscopic signatures it has been programmed to detect.
Duling indicated that the accuracy of the detection program was very high, and that there is a low false alarm rate. The detection system is based upon proprietary algorithms written by Duling and API engineers for use in the system's internal semiconductors.
Jane's reports that at present, the system when purchased in bulk will retail at around $70,000 per unit.
Jane's article also reports that the device is relatively maintenance free, and because it uses automated software user training is very minimal, (5-10 minutes) to achieve operator proficiency.
The entire article is available at the present time only to subscribers, but is a very interesting read, and contains much more information about this exciting device, which is currently being vetted for use by the TSA, as a result of API's development partnership of the device,  with In-Q-Tel.
(The article also details the very interesting work of CEA-Leti, to develop and deploy their THz system for airport security uses, which I hope to blog about in the near future).