When comparing the average citation impact of research groups, universities and countries, field normalisation reduces the influence of discipline and time. Confidence intervals for these indicators can help with attempts to infer whether differences between sets of publications are due to chance factors. Although both bootstrapping and formulae have been proposed for these, their accuracy is u...

Recent advances in neuroimaging and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarker assays have provided evidence of a long preclinical stage of Alzheimer's disease (AD). This period is being increasingly targeted for secondary prevention trials of new therapies. In this context, the interest of a noninvasive, cost-effective amyloid-β (Aβ) blood-based test does not need to be overstated. Nevertheless, a th...

Roles of lung volumes in asthma remain controversial. We aimed to evaluate the efficacy of lung volumes in differentiating asthma severity levels. Consecutive outpatients with chronic persistent asthma were enrolled, and body plethysmography (BP) and helium dilution (HD) were performed simultaneously to extract RV%pred, TLC%pred, and RV/TLC. Significant negative correlations were found between ...

This study investigated whether being charged with a child pornography offense is a valid diagnostic indicator of pedophilia, as represented by an index of phallometrically assessed sexual arousal to children. The sample of 685 male patients was referred between 1995 and 2004 for a sexological assessment of their sexual interests and behavior. As a group, child pornography offenders showed grea...

INTRODUCTION Prompt and accurate diagnosis of sepsis is of high importance for clinicians. Procalcitonine (PCT) and C-reactive protein (CRP) have been proposed as markers for this purpose. Our aim was to evaluate the levels of PCT and CRP in early sepsis and its correlation with severity of sepsis. METHODS Levels of PCT and CRP were taken from 60 patients with sepsis criteria and 39 patients ...

Diagnostic testing can be used to discriminate subjects with a target disorder from subjects without it. Several indicators of diagnostic performance have been proposed, such as sensitivity and specificity. Using paired indicators can be a disadvantage in comparing the performance of competing tests, especially if one test does not outperform the other on both indicators. Here we propose the us...

Detecting early signs of failures (anomalies) in complex systems is one of the main goal of preventive maintenance. It allows in particular to avoid actual failures by (re)scheduling maintenance operations in a way that optimizes maintenance costs. Aircraft engine health monitoring is one representative example of a field in which anomaly detection is crucial. Manufacturers collect large amount...

We present a formalization of indicators of diagnostic performance (sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predic-­‐ tive value) in the context of a realist ontology. We dissociate the indica-­‐ tors of diagnostic performance from their estimations and argu...