Controlled trials in single subjects.

Controlled trials in single subjects. 1. Value in clinical medicine.

Randomised controlled group trials are the gold standard in clinical research and provide information about the average effect of a treatment in a target population. Such information, however, cannot necessarily be transferred to a single patient because finding a significant effect of treatment does not mean that all the study subjects responded. Besides, in real life clinicians are often conf...

Blindness in Randomized Controlled Trials

In combination with randomization, blinding or masking is an important factor in randomized controlled trials (RCTs), particularly in trials that assess therapeutic effects. Here an attempt is made to explain blindness and why it is important. In clinical trials, blinding is defined as the condition imposed on a study in which study participants, health care providers and assessors collecting o...

Exploiting subjects in placebo-controlled trials.

Automated Extraction of Number of Subjects in Randomised Controlled Trials

We present a simple approach for automatically extracting the number of subjects involved in randomised controlled trials (RCT). Our approach first applies a set of rule-based techniques to extract candidate study sizes from the abstracts of the articles. Supervised classification is then performed over the candidates with support vector machines, using a small set of lexical, structural, and c...

blindness in randomized controlled trials

in combination with randomization, blinding or masking is an important factor in randomized controlled trials (rcts), particularly in trials that assess therapeutic effects. here an attempt is made to explain blindness and why it is important. in clinical trials, blinding is defined as the condition imposed on a study in which study participants, health care providers and assessors collecting o...