Main description:

Introductory Medical Statistics, now in its third edition, is an introductory textbook on basic statistical techniques. It is written for physicians, surgeons, radiation oncologists, medical physicists, radiographers, hospital administrators, medical statisticians in training, biochemists, and other professionals allied to medicine. It is suitable as a teaching text for clinicians working towards their professional examinations. It is also suitable for Maters degree courses in medical physics.

The third edition has been extensively revised and expanded to include:

Clinical trial design and analysis]

Multivariate analysis

Cox proportional hazards model

McNemar, Wicoxon, Mann-Whitney, Kruskal-Wallis, Mantel-Haenszel, and Kappa tests

Kaplan-Meier survival rates

Sensitivity and Specificity

Specification of treatment success, cure, and quality of life

Risk specification

Case-control and cohort epidemiological studies

Glossary of terms

The major change has been the advent of personal computing, so people rely on the power of their machine, and its software to number crunch. What is missing is that the software may not use the appropriate statistical error standard - Dick Mould

Contents:

Data presentation. Describing cuves and distributions. The normal distribution curve. Introduction to sampling, errors and accuracy. Introduction to probability. Binomial probabilities. Poisson probabilities. Introduction to statistical significance. The chi-squared test. The Fisher exact probability test. The t-test. Difference between proportions for independent and for non-independent (McNemar's test for paired proportions) samples. Wilcoxon, Mann-Whitney and sign tests. Survival rate calculations. The logrank and Mantel-Haenszel tests. Regression and correlation. Analysis of variance. Multivariate analysis: the Cox proportional hazards model. Sensitivity and specificity. Clinical trials. Cancer treatment success, cure and quality of life. Risk specification with emphasis on ionising radiation. Types of epidemiological study: case-control, cohort and cross-sectional. Glossary of rates and ratios: terminology in vital statistics. References. Index.