TRIAL REGISTRATION AND THE PUBLISHED ARTICLE The published article describes a 2-arm trial of 300 infants comparing the Mogen clamp (n = 153) with the Plastibell device (n = 147). However, the trial registration documents on ClinicalTrials. gov (NCT00971958) has, since June 24, 2011, described a 3-arm trial with the AccuCirc device added as a third arm, making a total sample size of 450. The tr...

Numerous studies have evaluated the association between the X-ray repair complementing defective repair in Chinese hamster cells 3 (XRCC3) T241M polymorphism and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) risk. However, the results of such investigations have proved inconsistent. Therefore, we performed a meta-analysis of the association between this polymorphism and HCC risk in the Chinese population. Pub...

Here, the establishment of Europe's largest high-throughput crystallization facility with open access to the general user community is reported. The facility covers every step in the crystallization process from the preparation of crystallization cocktails for initial or customized screens to the setup of hanging-drop vapour-diffusion experiments and their automatic imaging. In its first year o...

The estimation of the correct number of dimensions is a long-standing problem in psychometrics. Several methods have been proposed, such as parallel analysis (PA), Kaiser-Guttman's eigenvalue-greater-than-one rule, multiple average partial procedure (MAP), the maximum-likelihood approaches that use fit indexes as BIC and EBIC and the less used and studied approach called very simple structure (...

Genome-wide scans for selection have identified multiple regions of the human genome as being targeted by positive selection. However, only a small proportion has been replicated across studies, and the prevalence of positive selection as a mechanism of adaptive change in humans remains controversial. Here we explore the power of two haplotype-based statistics--the integrated haplotype score (i...

BACKGROUND During the last 30 years, the median sample size of research studies published in high-impact medical journals has increased manyfold, while the use of non-parametric tests has increased at the expense of t-tests. This paper explores this paradoxical practice and illustrates its consequences. METHODS A simulation study is used to compare the rejection rates of the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whi...

LIDDY MIAOLI CHEN: DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS FOR COMPLEX SURVIVAL MODELS. (Under the direction of Dr. Joseph G. Ibrahim and Dr. Haitao Chu.) Various complex survival models, such as joint models of survival and longitudinal data and multivariate frailty models, have gained popularity in recent years because these models can maximize the utilization of information collected. It has been shown that t...

OBJECTIVES To investigate the impact of increasing sample of records reviewed bi-weekly with the Global Trigger Tool method to identify adverse events in hospitalised patients. DESIGN Retrospective observational study. SETTING A Norwegian 524-bed general hospital trust. PARTICIPANTS 1920 medical records selected from 1 January to 31 December 2010. PRIMARY OUTCOMES Rate, type and severit...

Various methods are available for estimating usual dietary intake distributions. Hence, there is a need for simulation studies to compare them. The methods Iowa State University (ISU), National Cancer Institute (NCI), Multiple Source Method (MSM) and Statistical Program to Assess Dietary Exposure (SPADE) were previously compared in another study, but some results were inconclusive due to the sm...

The analysis of factorial designs in a nonparametric setup has been restricted mainly to the one-way layout. Procedures for higher-way layouts are either restricted to semiparametric models or to special designs. Moreover, the continuity of the underlying distribution functions is assumed in general. The aim of this paper is to provide a general theory for the analysis of nonparametric factoria...