Introduction The Sysmex XN-series haematology analyser has newly adopted a fluorescent channel to measure immature platelet fraction (IPF). To promote the clinical utility of this promising parameter, establishing a reliable reference interval is mandatory. According to previous studies, IPF values may be affected by the employed analyser and the ethnic background of the individual, but no diff...

A 47-year-old African American woman was evaluated for a prolonged prothrombin time (PT) result obtained before she underwent right total hip arthroplasty. The patient had no history of gastrointestinal or intracranial bleeding, epistaxis, or hemarthrosis. However, she reported a tendency toward easy limb bruising and menorrhagia, which required iron supplementation. She had a negative family h...

data envelopment analysis (dea) is a method for measuring the relative efficiencies of a set of decision-making units (dmus) that use multiple inputs to produce multiple outputs. in this paper, we study the measurement of dmu performances in dea in situations where input and/or output values are given as imprecise data. by imprecise data we mean situations where we only know that the actual val...

BACKGROUND Defining reference intervals is a major challenge because of the difficulty in recruiting volunteers to participate and testing samples from a significant number of healthy reference individuals. Historical literature citation intervals are often suboptimal because they're be based on obsolete methods and/or only a small number of poorly defined reference samples. METHODS Blood don...

This study examined the effects of emotion on implicit timing. In the implicit timing task used, the participants did not receive any temporal instructions. Instead they were simply asked and trained to press a key as quickly as possible after a stimulus (response stimulus) that was separated from a preceding stimulus by a given temporal interval (reference interval duration). However, in the t...

We compared the clinical performance of a carboxyl-terminal radioimmunoassay for human parathyroid hormone (iPTH), using either a dynamic reference interval (95% confidence limits of serum iPTH concentrations observed in 11 normal individuals during intravenous infusions of Na2EDTA and CaCl2) or a gaussian (2 SD) reference interval derived from 233 normocalcemic individuals. The 2 SD ranges wer...

In many practical situations, we only know the upper bound ∆ on the measurement error: |∆x| ≤ ∆. In other words, we only know that the measurement error is located on the interval [−∆,∆]. The traditional approach is to assume that ∆x is uniformly distributed on [−∆,∆]. In some situations, however, this approach underestimates the error of indirect measurements. It is therefore desirable to dire...

A 33-year-old nulligravid woman presented to her gynecologist after experiencing 5 months of secondary amenorrhea following discontinuation of oral contraceptives. She had undergone normal puberty and menarche with no significant past medical or surgical history. Her family history was unremarkable other than a brother with developmental delay. On exam she was 165 cm tall and weighed 67 kg, wit...

Access graphs, which have been used previously in connection to competitive analysis and relative worst order analysis to model locality of reference in paging, are considered in connection with relative interval analysis. The algorithms LRU, FIFO, FWF, and FAR are compared using the path, star, and cycle access graphs. In this model, some of the results obtained are not surprising. However, al...