INTRODUCTION From 2001-2009 there have been numerous community alerts and notifications about the rocket salad produced in Italy and distributed in Europe. Our study describes the evolution of the microbial quality of ready to eat rocket salad during shelf life among three different Italian producers. MATERIAL AND METHODS Total Mesophilic Count (TMC) and Escherichia coli (EC) count were measu...

The selection of an adequate regression model is the basis for obtaining accurate and reproducible results during the bionalytical method validation. Given the wide concentration range, frequently present in bioanalytical assays, heteroscedasticity of the data may be expected. Several weighted linear and quadratic regression models were evaluated during the selection of the adequate curve fit u...

We consider the decision problem of making causal conclusions from observational data. Typically, using standard matched pairs techniques, there is a source of uncertainty that is not usually quantified, namely the uncertainty due to the choice of the experimenter: two different reasonable experimenters can easily have opposite results. In this work we present an alternative to the standard non...

Non-parametric paired analyses are approached through the same logic as the parametric paired t-tests: a 2 sample paired analysis can be reduced to a 1 sample test by creating a single distribution of the differences between each pair. If the distribution of the differences are nonnormal, and cannot be normalized by transforming the data to some other ratio scale, a 1 sample non-parametric test...

The population bioequivalence of two measurements is considered via diierentiable statistical functionals. This approach leads to eecient nonparame-tric bioequivalence tests given by the canonical gradient of the functional. The results are based on an asymptotic comparison of nonparametric power functions of rank tests. The bioequivalence regions are determined by implicit alternatives speciie...

BACKGROUND Although non-normal data are widespread in biomedical research, parametric tests unnecessarily predominate in statistical analyses. METHODS We surveyed five biomedical journals and - for all studies which contain at least the unpaired t-test or the non-parametric Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test - investigated the relationship between the choice of a statistical test and other variables ...

PURPOSE The efficacy of the reduction time (tau) after castration as a prognostic factor was examined by comparing to Gleason score. MATERIALS AND METHODS The change of prostatic volume after castration was observed from the castration to 3 months after in 24 cases of prostatic cancer. Prostatic volume was examined by transrectal ultrasonography of the prostate. Survival curves was calculated...

In this study, we conducted a pretest-posttest investigation of a sports-oriented occupational therapy intervention using surfing in an experiential, skills-based program to support veterans with symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in their transition to civilian life. The purpose of this feasibility study was to evaluate the intervention for attendance rates and retention in the p...

Classical approaches for analyzing reverse transcription quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) data commonly require normalization before assessing differential expression (DE). Normalization often has a substantial effect on the interpretation and validity of the subsequent analysis steps, but at the same time it causes a reduction in variance and introduces dependence among the nor...

The authors give the exact coefficient of 1/N in a saddlepoint approximation to the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney null-distribution. This saddlepoint approximation is obtained from an Edgeworth approximation to the exponentially tilted distribution. Moreover, the rate of convergence of the relative error is uniformly of order O(1/N) in a large deviation interval as defined in Feller (1971). The propose...