Allowing for a required confidence of 95%, a precision of 20%, a population size of 8,441,000 in 2005 [11], a design effect of 2.3, and 15% non-response, the required sample size was estimated to be 8399 subjects (Epi Info 6.04).
Allowing for a 30% dropout rate required 75 patients to be recruited to the study.
Consequently, allowing for a 40% dropout rate requires a sample size in each arm of 107, or an overall sample size of 214.
Furthermore, the focused beam can be scanned along the fiber, allowing for a movable hotspot, which is required for bottle fabrication [54].
Nevertheless, to fully develop the potential of SELPs, new polymer designs with altered and improved properties are required, allowing for a better understanding of the design of these but also leading to an expanded range of novel polymers with potentially enhanced applicability.
In total, for all 3 stages, 1000 patients will be required (allowing for a 10% drop-out), 210 in stages A/B (phase II), and a further 790 in stage C (phase III).
The number of mismatches between a pair of sequences can be computed with a simple scan of the sequences, whereas computing the edit distance (allowing for indels) requires a more sophisticated algorithm such as the Smith Waterman sequence alignment algorithm (Smith et al., 1981), whose runtime is proportional to the product of the sequence lengths.
Based on these findings, a sample size of 1,585 was required, and allowing for a 50% loss to follow-up after excluding ineligible women, a total of 3,170 women who met the inclusion criterion were needed to participate.
Taking a stratified cluster sample within the region at the district level for logistic reasons, and allowing for a design effect of 2, this required a population of around 900,000 people, equating to six typical districts.
To have a two-tail significance test, a significance level of α = 0.05 and 90% power to detect a difference as small as 0.5, for a standard deviation of 0.72, and using an allocation of 3 2 for the prednisolone and placebo groups while allowing for a 20% dropout rate, the study required at least 66 patients to be treated with prednisolone and 44 to be treated with placebo.
This example shows that a more flexible and dynamic system architecture is required, allowing for an easy combination of different processing modules.
