Before a new STR system or STR multiplex may be routinely employed in human identity testing it should be extensively validated to insure reliability of results. We have included below many of the validation studies which have appeared in the literature. We hope this material will help future researchers design their validation studies and allow those who use common STR systems to review what s...

Because of its role in human disease, there are increasing global requirements for reliable diagnostic and control methods for Trichinella in food animals to ensure meat safety and to facilitate trade. Consequently, there is a need for standardization of methods, programs, and best practices used in the control of Trichinella and trichinellosis. This review article describes the biology and epi...

Theory and results of flight-test validation are presented for a novel adaptive law that concurrently uses current as well as recorded data for improving the performance of model reference adaptive control architectures. This novel adaptive law is termed concurrent learning. This adaptive law restricts theweight updates based on stored data to the null-space of the weight updates based on curre...

CONTEXT Patients are the most valid source for evaluating the accessibility of services, but a previous study observed differential psychometric performance of instruments in rural and urban respondents. OBJECTIVE To validate a measure of organizational accessibility free of differential rural-urban performance that predicts consequences of difficult access for patient-initiated care. DESIG...

OBJECTIVE This work sought to develop, validate, and determine the reliability of an instrument on Competency in Homecare of the family caregiver of an individual with chronic disease. METHODOLOGY The test validation study was carried out in the following phases: 1) literature review; 2) analysis of results of programs to help family caregivers in Latin America; 3) exploration of the classifi...

BACKGROUND Although self-management reportedly can improve the health and quality of life of patients with COPD, there is no validated instrument for evaluating the status of the self-management of patients with COPD. METHODS A 51-item COPD Self-Management Scale (CSMS), including 5 domains (symptom management, daily life management, emotion management, information management, and self-efficac...

Clinical microbiology and public health laboratories are beginning to utilize next-generation sequencing (NGS) for a range of applications. This technology has the potential to transform the field by providing approaches that will complement, or even replace, many conventional laboratory tests. While the benefits of NGS are significant, the complexities of these assays require an evolving set o...

OBJECTIVE To generate a classification of methods to evaluate medical tests when there is no gold standard. METHODS Multiple search strategies were employed to obtain an overview of the different methods described in the literature, including searches of electronic databases, contacting experts for papers in personal archives, exploring databases from previous methodological projects and cros...