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Educational and Psychological Measurement, Vol. 37, No. 4. (1 December 1977), pp. 1031-1038.The Arizona Clinical Interview Rating Scale is examined for construct validity as an instrument to evaluate the interviewing techniques of medical students. Evidence was gathered in the areas of convergent and discriminant validity, sensitivity to change, internal consistency, and objectivity. 10.1177/001316447703700427Paula Stillman, David Brown, Doris Redfield, Darrell Sabers, citeulike.org

Web Semant., Vol. 5, No. 1. (March 2007), pp. 28-38.Simon Miles, Sylvia Wong, Weijian Fang, Paul Groth, Klaus-Peter Zauner, Luc Moreau, citeulike.org

(2005), pp. 577-584.This paper views clusterings as elements of a lattice. Distances between clusterings are analyzed in their relationship to the lattice. From this vantage point, we first give an axiomatic characterization of some criteria for comparing clusterings, including the variation of information and the unadjusted Rand index. Then we study other distances between partitions w.r.t these axioms and prove an impossibility result: there is no "sensible" criterion for comparing clusterings that is simultaneously (1) aligned with the lattice of partitions, (2) convexely additive, and (3) bounded.Marina Meila, citeulike.org

Biomedical Simulation (2008), pp. 176-184.Computational techniques for the analysis of mechanical problems have recently moved from traditional engineering disciplines to biomedical simulations. Thus, the number of complex models describing the mechanical behavior of medical environments have increased these last years. While the development of advanced computational tools has led to interesting modeling algorithms, the relevances of these models are often criticized due to incomplete model verification and validation. The objective of this paper is to propose a framework and a methodology for assessing deformable models. This proposal aims at providing tools for testing the behavior of new modeling algorithms proposed in the context of medical simulation. Initial validation results comparing different modeling methods are reported as a first step towards a more complete validation framework and methodology.Maud Marchal, Jérémie Allard, Christian Duriez, Stéphane Cotin, citeulike.org

Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine, Vol. 11, No. 9. (September 2004), pp. 931-937.OBJECTIVES: To examine the responses of emergency medicine residents (EMRs) to ethical dilemmas in high-fidelity patient simulations as a means of assessing resident professionalism. METHODS: This cross-sectional observational study included all EMRs at a three-year training program. Subjects were excluded if they were unable or unwilling to participate. Each resident subject participated in a simulated critical patient encounter during an Emergency Medicine Crisis Resource Management course. An ethical dilemma was introduced before the end of each simulated encounter. Resident responses to that dilemma were compared with a professional performance checklist evaluation. Multi-response permutation procedure analysis was used to compare performance measures between resident classes, with the a priori hypothesis that mean performance should increase as experience increases. RESULTS: Of the 30 potential subjects, 90% (27) participated. The remaining three residents were unavailable due to scheduling conflicts. It was observed that senior residents (second and third year) performed more checklist items than did first-year residents (p < 0.028 for each senior class). Omnibus comparison of mean critical actions completed across all three years was not statistically significant (p < 0.13). Residents performed a critical action with 100% uniformity across training years in only one ethical scenario ("Practicing Procedures on the Recently Dead"). Residents performed the fewest critical actions and overall checklist items for the "Patient Confidentiality" case. CONCLUSIONS: Senior residents had better overall performance than incoming interns, suggesting that professional behaviors are learned through some facet of residency training. Although limited by small sample size, the application of this performance-assessment tool showed the ability to discriminate between experienced and inexperienced EMRs with respect to a variety of aspects of professional competency. These findings suggest a need for improved resident education in areas of professionalism and ethics.MA Gisondi, R Smith-Coggins, PM Harter, RC Soltysik, PR Yarnold, citeulike.org

J. Natl. Cancer Inst. (7 October 2008), djn326.Research methods for biomarker evaluation lag behind those for evaluating therapeutic treatments. Although a phased approach to development of biomarkers exists and guidelines are available for reporting study results, a coherent and comprehensive set of guidelines for study design has not been delineated. We describe a nested case-control study design that involves prospective collection of specimens before outcome ascertainment from a study cohort that is relevant to the clinical application. The biomarker is assayed in a blinded fashion on specimens from randomly selected case patients and control subjects in the study cohort. We separately describe aspects of the design that relate to the clinical context, biomarker performance criteria, the biomarker test, and study size. The design can be applied to studies of biomarkers intended for use in disease diagnosis, screening, or prognosis. Common biases that pervade the biomarker research literature would be eliminated if these rigorous standards were followed. 10.1093/jnci/djn326Margaret Pepe, Ziding Feng, Holly Janes, Patrick Bossuyt, John Potter, citeulike.org

Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Vol. 22, No. 8. (August 2007), pp. 1214-1219.Sedlack, E Robert, citeulike.org

Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on, Vol. 14, No. 9. (2005), pp. 1338-1350.An automated method is presented for selecting optimal parameter settings for vessel/neurite segmentation algorithms using the minimum description length principle and a recursive random search algorithm. It trades off a probabilistic measure of image-content coverage against its conciseness. It enables nonexpert users to select parameter settings objectively, without knowledge of underlying algorithms, broadening the applicability of the segmentation algorithm, and delivering higher morphometric accuracy. It enables adaptation of parameters across batches of images. It simplifies the user interface to just one optional parameter and reduces the cost of technical support. Finally, the method is modular, extensible, and amenable to parallel computation. The method is applied to 223 images of human retinas and cultured neurons, from four different sources, using a single segmentation algorithm with eight parameters. Improvements in segmentation quality compared to default settings using 1000 iterations ranged from 4.7%-21%. Paired t-tests showed that improvements are statistically significant (p, citeulike.org

BMC Bioinformatics, Vol. 8 (14 September 2007), 340.Andrew Hill, Peter Lapan, Yizheng Li, Steve Haney, citeulike.org

QSAR & Combinatorial Science, Vol. 26, No. 5. (2007), pp. 694-701.The recent REACH Policy of the European Union has led to scientists and regulators to focus their attention on establishing general validation principles for QSAR models in the context of chemical regulation (previously known as the Setubal, nowadays, the OECD principles). This paper gives a brief analysis of some principles: unambiguous algorithm, Applicability Domain (AD), and statistical validation. Some concerns related to QSAR algorithm reproducibility and an example of a fast check of the applicability domain for MLR models are presented. Common myths and misconceptions related to popular techniques for verifying internal predictivity, particularly for MLR models (for instance cross-validation, bootstrap), are commented on and compared with commonly used statistical techniques for external validation. The differences in the two validating approaches are highlighted, and evidence is presented that only models that have been validated externally, after their internal validation, can be considered reliable and applicable for both external prediction and regulatory purposes.Paola Gramatica, citeulike.org