Caution Should Be Exercised When Using the Standardized Infection Ratio

Should caution be exercised with regard to the use of cardiac magnetic resonance?

Researchers at the GIGA-Cardiovascular Sciences laboratory of the University of Liege are advising caution with regard to repeated use of cardiac magnetic resonance, a commonly-used radiological examination. They showed that this examination induced signals that mimic DNA double-strand breaks in T lymphocytes, but that this effect, which is slight and temporary, disappears after one year. Howev...

receiver operating characteristic curve and odds ratio should be used with caution

Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve and Odds Ratio Should Be Used with Caution

We read with interest the article by Abu El Makarem MA et al. (1) entitled, “Platelet count/bipolar spleen diameter ratio for the prediction of esophageal varices: The special Egyptian situation.” This study evaluated noninvasive predictors of esophageal varices in cirrhotic patients by multivariate logistic regression and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis. However, in our ...

Why voxel-based morphometric analysis should be used with great caution when characterizing group differences.

A variety of voxel-based morphometric analysis methods have been adopted by the neuroimaging community in the recent years. In this commentary we describe why voxel-based statistics, which are commonly used to construct statistical parametric maps, are very limited in characterizing morphological differences between groups, and why the effectiveness of voxel-based statistics is significantly bi...

Should Medicare HMO benefits be standardized?

Legislation enacted in 1990 standardized Medigap benefits but not the benefits of health maintenance organizations (HMOs) that serve Medicare beneficiaries. An examination of marketing materials in two large counties reveals the potential for enormous confusion among beneficiaries because of differences in wording to describe the same benefit, health plans' failure to list Medicare-covered serv...