INTRODUCTION Pilot studies are meritorious for determining the feasibility of a definitive clinical trial in terms of conduct and potential for efficacy, but their possible applications for planning a future trial are not always fully realized. The purpose of this review was to estimate the extent to which pilot/feasibility studies: (i) addressed needed objectives; (ii) led to definitive trials...

BACKGROUND In 2004, a review of pilot studies published in seven major medical journals during 2000-01 recommended that the statistical analysis of such studies should be either mainly descriptive or focus on sample size estimation, while results from hypothesis testing must be interpreted with caution. We revisited these journals to see whether the subsequent recommendations have changed the p...

Today wireless networks are increasingly used to perform applications with Quality of Service constraints (QoS) such as delay, delivery ratio, and channel reliability. Especially, as demand for real-time transmissions increases, transmitting packets with hard delivery deadlines poses an important network control problem. In this thesis, we propose a framework for characterizing feasibility regi...