Multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) is attracting considerable interest as a tool to assist decision makers faced with the challenge of considering a range of relevant factors when making their decision. The Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC) is a long-established national health technology assessment (HTA) agency providing guidance to the health service on all new medicines. The stated cri...

Decisions about infrastructure projects or new policies in the transport sector have traditionally been based on cost benefit analysis (CBA). However, as society in general becomes more and more complex, this affects the decisionmaking process. Thus decision-makers are confronted with the difficult problem of evaluating potential outcomes and choosing policies to achieve the desired outcomes in...

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is widely used for identifying the major components of statistically distributed point clouds. Robust versions of PCA, often based in part on the l norm (rather than the l norm), are increasingly used, especially for point clouds with many outliers. Neither standard PCA nor robust PCAs can provide, without additional assumptions, reliable information for outli...

Contaminated sediments and other sites present a difficult challenge for environmental decisionmakers. They are typically slow to recover or attenuate naturally, may involve multiple regulatory agencies and stakeholder groups, and engender multiple toxicological and ecotoxicological risks. While environmental decision-making strategies over the last several decades have evolved into increasingl...

Untreated twin-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS) is associated with significant mortality and neurological impairment. Fetoscopic laser surgery (FLS) is the treatment of choice. We sought to assess intracranial abnormalities in TTTS twins following treatment. In this prospective, blinded study MRI scans were performed on 3 groups; (1) monochorionic diamniotic (MCDA) twins with TTTS who had under...

The complex epidemiology of vector-borne diseases creates significant challenges in the design and delivery of prevention and control strategies, especially in light of rapid social and environmental changes. Spatial models for predicting disease risk based on environmental factors such as climate and landscape have been developed for a number of important vector-borne diseases. The resulting r...

The aim of this paper is to convince the MultiCriteria Decision Aid (MCDA) and Preference Learning communities to investigate and to contribute in the development of methodologies dedicated to hospital ranking. To do so, we present the French hospital ranking and show how these rankings can be built properly through two existing methods: decision tree and ELECTRE Tri.

Interval-valued fuzzy sets involve more uncertainties than ordinary fuzzy sets and can be used to capture imprecise or uncertain decision information in fields that require multiple-criteria decision analysis (MCDA). This paper takes the simple additive weighting (SAW) method and the technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS) as the main structure to deal with in...

BACKGROUND Twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS) affects 10-20 % of monochorionic diamniotic (MCDA) births and accounts for 50 % of fetal loss in MCDA pregnancies. This exploratory qualitative study identified shared experiences, including potential emotional and psychosocial impacts, of this serious disease. METHODS Forty-five publicly accessible, online stories posted by families who exp...

The GIS-multicriteria decision analysis (GIS-MCDA) technique is increasingly used for landslide hazard mapping and zonation. It enables the integration of different data layers with different levels of uncertainty. In this study, three different GIS-MCDA methods were applied to landslide susceptibility mapping for the Urmia lake basin in northwest Iran. Nine landslide causal factors were used, ...