BACKGROUND Colorectal cancer screening and treatment are rapidly evolving. Aims To reappraise stool-based colorectal cancer screening in light of changing test performance characteristics, lower test cost and increasing colorectal cancer care costs. METHODS Using a Markov model, we compared faecal DNA testing every 3 years, annual faecal occult blood testing or immunochemical testing, and col...

Genetic testing for breast and ovarian cancer has been publicly available since the mid-1990 discovery of two breast/ovarian cancer susceptibility genes named BRCA1 and BRCA2. Although many professionals say that genetic testing may be the best available preventative medicine breakthrough, controversy abounds over whether the medical benefits of BRCA1/2 mutation testing outweigh the psychologic...

BACKGROUND Minimal residual disease (MRD) testing by higher performance techniques such as flow cytometry and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) can be used to detect the proportion of remaining leukemic cells in bone marrow or peripheral blood during and after the first phases of chemotherapy in children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). The results of MRD testing are used to reclassify th...

The comparison of homologous proteins from different species is a first step toward a function assignment and a reconstruction of the species evolution. Though local alignment is mostly used for this purpose, global alignment is important for constructing multiple alignments or phylogenetic trees. However, statistical significance of global alignments is not completely clear, lacking a specific...

ÐRegression testing is an important activity that can account for a large proportion of the cost of software maintenance. One approach to reducing the cost of regression testing is to employ a selective regression testing technique that 1) chooses a subset of a test suite that was used to test the software before the modifications, then 2) uses this subset to test the modified software. Selecti...

A major issue in the production of software by a software company is the estimation of the total expenditure likely to be incurred in developing, testing, and debugging a new package or product. If the development cost and development schedule are assumed known, then the major cost factors are the testing cost, the risk cost for the errors that remain in the software at the end of testing, and ...

Rapid diagnostic tools have been shown to improve linkage of patients to care. In the context of infectious diseases, assessing the impact and cost-effectiveness of such tools at the population level, accounting for both direct and indirect effects, is key to informing adoption of these tools. Point-of-care (POC) CD4 testing has been shown to be highly effective in increasing the proportion of ...

A probabilistic method for solving the Monge-Kantorovich mass transport problem on R is introduced. A system of empirical measures of independent particles is built in such a way that it obeys a doubly indexed large deviation principle with an optimal transport cost as its rate function. As a consequence, new approximation results for the optimal cost function and the optimal transport plans ar...