The term “quantitative“ means many things to many people. in imaging its value is often discounted to mean only that a more intense region can be said to have more of what is being measured than a less intense region. Others may be more stringent and require an approximately linear relationship between the measured property and image intensity. (This is most often the case in EFTEM and spectrum imaging) Some specimens contain internal references (such as elements with a known stoichiometric relationship) that are sufficient to get to a true concentration calibration for an image. However, in EELS imaging this still doesn’t allow us to get an understanding of our errors and rarely is it helpful in determining detection or quantification limits.

A competent high-school chemistry or physics student could tell us that a quantitative measurement includes both a measured value and an estimate of its error.