D e s c r i p t i o n o f t e s t s a n d d i a g n o s t i c s t a n d a r d Blood for BNP levels was taken using the Triage BNP test (Biosite Diagnostics, San Diego, CA, USA), a point-of-care method based on fluorescence immunoassay. The BNP measurements were done on frozen plasma approximately 1 to 2 months after blood collection. Doppler echocardiography was done within 60 minutes of enroll...

The aim of the present study was to compare physiological responses derived from an incremental progressive field test with a constant speed test i.e. intermittent versus continuous protocol. Two progressive maximum tests (Carminatti`s test (T-CAR) and the Vameval test (T-VAM)), characterized by increasing speed were used. T-CAR is an intermittent incremental test, performed as shuttle runs; wh...

Group testing was first discovered by Dorfman [l] when he did blood testing during World War II. Since then, one has found many applications in statistics, , combinatorics and computer science. The general form of the problem is as follows: Let N be a set of n items denoted by 1,2, . . . , n; some items are defective. We need to find out all defective items by a given kind of tests. What is the...

t-Tests are widely used by researchers to compare the average values of a numeric outcome between two groups. If there are doubts about the suitability of the data for the requirements of a t-test, most notably the distribution being non-normal, the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test may be used instead. However, although often applied, both tests may be invalid when discrete and/or extremely skew data...

Otsu's binarization method is one of the most popular image-thresholding methods; Student's t -test is one of the most widely-used statistical tests to compare two groups. This paper aims to stress the equivalence between Otsu's binarization method and the search for an optimal threshold that provides the largest absolute Student's t-statistic. It is then naturally demonstrated that the extensi...