Radiofrequency Electrode Failure During a Percutaneous Cervical Cordotomy: Standard Testing Software Algorithms of Modern RF Machines May Fail to Detect Faults

SimExplorer: A Testing Framework to Detect Elusive Software Faults

Percutaneous cervical cordotomy in cancer pain.

The aim of this study was to review all published articles in the literature in English regarding percutaneous cervical cordotomy in cancer pain. Percutaneous cordotomy may be used to relieve unilateral pain below the level of the neck arising from a variety of causes. It is particularly indicated for unilateral chest pain associated with malignant disease. We searched for reports on MEDLINE an...

Percutaneous radiofrequency sympathicolysis versus surgical standard procedure.

We read with interest the recently published paper by Purtuloglu et al. [1]. It retrospectively compared a group of patients treated with surgical sympathectomy with another group who received percutaneous radiofrequency ablation therapy. First, we would like to comment on their final conclusion, particularly on two issues: (i) the amazing statement that they have published ‘the first clinical ...

Risk assessment's insensitive toxicity testing may cause it to fail.

BACKGROUND Risk assessment of chemicals and other agents must be accurate to protect health. We analyse the determinants of a sensitive chronic toxicity study, risk assessment's most important test. Manufacturers originally generate data on the properties of a molecule, and if government approval is needed to market it, laws globally require toxicity data to be generated using Test Guidelines (...

Testing software to detect and reduce risk

The risk of a piece of software is de®ned to be the expected cost due to operational failures of the software. Notions of the risk detected by a testing technique and the risk reduction due to a technique are introduced and are used to analytically compare the e€ectiveness of testing techniques. It is proved that if a certain relation holds between testing techniques A and B, then A is guarante...