The standardisation of measurements is of high priority in laboratory medicine, its purpose being to achieve closer comparability of results obtained using routine measurement procedures. At present, there is international cooperation in developing reference measurement systems (reference methods, reference materials, and reference laboratory networks) for analytes of clinical significance. The...

Network reliability is an important issue in the area of distributed computing. Most of the early work in this area takes a probabilistic approach to the problem. However, sometimes it is important to incorporate subjective reliability estimates into the measure. To serve this goal, we propose the use of the weighted integrity, a measure of graph vulnerability. The weighted integrity problem is...

INTRODUCTION In a previous review of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) on the pharmacotherapeutic management of aggression, it was shown that there is only weak evidence of effectiveness. In the present study we aim to determine comparability of patients included in these RCTs and patients of psychiatric long-stay wards. METHODS Exclusion criteria that were used in at least 20% of the RCTs ...

A description of the development of a strategy for improving the standardization of coagulation tests and the rationale behind the recommendations that follow are the subject of this position paper. Such an endeavor has been occasioned by the advances in the technology for the diagnosis and therapeutic treatment of hemorrhagic and thromboembolic diseases. These and anticipated further advances ...

Reference intervals are essential for clinical laboratory test interpretation and patient care. Methods for estimating them are expensive, difficult to perform, often inaccurate, and nonreproducible. A computerized indirect Hoffmann method was studied for accuracy and reproducibility. The study used data collected retrospectively for 5 analytes without exclusions and filtering from a nationwide...

Information Retrieval (IR) has benefited from standard evaluation practices and re-usable software components, that enable comparability between systems and experiments. However, Interactive IR (IIR) has had only very limited benefit from these developments, in part because experiments are still built using bespoke components and interfaces. In this paper we propose a flexible workbench for con...

INTRODUCTION New York City has one of the highest reported death rates from coronary heart disease in the United States. We sought to measure the accuracy of this rate by examining death certificates. METHODS We conducted a cross-sectional validation study by using a random sample of death certificates that recorded in-hospital deaths in New York City from January through June 2003, stratifie...

An undirected graph is a treelike comparability graph if it admits a transitive orientation such that its transitive reduction is a tree. We show that treelike comparability graphs are distance hereditary. Utilizing this property, we give a linear time recognition algorithm. We then characterize permutation graphs that are treelike. Finally, we consider the Partitioning into Bounded Cliques pro...

The complexity of the graph isomorphism problem for trapezoid graphs has been open over a decade. This paper shows that the problem is GI-complete. More precisely, we show that the graph isomorphism problem is GI-complete for comparability graphs of partially ordered sets with interval dimension 2 and height 3. In contrast, the problem is known to be solvable in polynomial time for comparabilit...

The study evaluated the comparability of two versions of a certification test: a paperand-pencil test (PPT) and computer-based test (CBT). An effect size measure known as Cohen’s d and differential item functioning (DIF) analyses were used as measures of comparability at the test and item levels, respectively. Results indicated that the effect sizes were small (d < 0.20) and not statistically s...