A commercially available holotranscobalamin (holo-TC) radioimmunoassay (RIA) (Axis-Shield, Dundee, Scotland) was evaluated in four laboratories and compared with a holoTC ELISA run in one laboratory. The performance of the holoTC RIA assay was comparable in three of the four participating laboratories. The results from these three laboratories, involving at least 20 initial runs of "low", "medi...

The objective was to evaluate the automatic ELISA Triturus analyser in order to assess its practicability and imprecision. The analyser was evaluated according to the guidelines of the Spanish Society of Clinical Chemistry. The evaluation was performed in two steps: evaluation of the imprecision and the inaccuracy of a semiquantitative and qualitative technique, and study of the practicability....

Proposed and interim European quality specifications for imprecision and inaccuracy have been compared with the US CLIA total error criteria for proficiency testing (PT). To assess the relative demands of separate imprecision and inaccuracy specifications vs total error criteria, we derived the imprecision and inaccuracy that would be allowable if a testing process were to provide 90% assurance...

Interval judgments are a way of handling preferential and informational imprecision in multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA). In this article, we study the use of intervals in the simple multiattribute rating technique (SMART) and SWING weighting methods. We generalize the methods by allowing the reference attribute to be any attribute, not just the most or the least important one, and by allo...

BACKGROUND Several prospective epidemiologic studies have demonstrated that high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP) is an effective serum marker for cardiac risk assessment. When hsCRP is considered in conjunction with traditional lipid screening, its clinical utility is further increased. In this report, hsCRP, HDL-cholesterol (HDLC), and total cholesterol (TC) assay imprecision is evaluat...

As more and more information from autonomous web databases becomes available to lay users, query processing over these databases must adapt to deal with the imprecise nature of user queries as well as incompleteness due to missing attribute values (aka “null values”) in the database. In such scenarios, the query processor begins to acquire the role of a recommender system. Specifically, in addi...

We define fuzzy constraint networks and prove a theorem about their relationship to fuzzy logic. Then we introduce Khayyam, a fuzzy constraint-based programming language in which any sentence in the first-order fuzzy predicate calculus is a well-formed constraint statement. Finally, using Khayyam to address an equipment selection application, we illustrate the expressive power of fuzzy constrai...

BACKGROUND Though social class differences in coronary heart disease (CHD) are well recognized, few studies have assessed the effect of imprecision in social class assessment on the relationship or the overall contribution of social class to attributable CHD risk. METHODS Prospective observational study of the relationship between occupational social class (assessed at baseline and after 20 y...