The International Neuroblastoma Risk Group INRG Task Forcece has defined standardised methods for the determination of minimal disease (MD) by immunocytology (IC) and quantitative reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (QRT-PCR) using disialoganglioside GD2 and tyrosine hydroxylase mRNA respectively.
Jacob Cohen, who originally defined standardised effect sizes, considered effect sizes of 0.2 or less to be small, 0.5 to be medium, and 0.8 and above to be large [ 20].
The outcome must be clearly defined and assessed blindly; The predictors must be clearly defined, standardised and evaluated without knowledge of patient status; The reliability of the variables studied must be demonstrated; Participants must be selected without bias and must represent a large range of clinical and demographic characteristics.
Within each subgroup, treatment methods will be clearly defined and standardised via detailed session-by-session clinical notes that contain a series of decision making algorithms.
In contrast to the standardisation that has been achieved with immunocytochemistry (Swerts et al, 2005), cytomorphological criteria for distinguishing immunofluorescence-labelled neuroblasts from falsely positive haematopoietic cells have never been defined and standardised.
Ten years ago the UK Audit Commission [ 23] cautioned that the length of time women spend in hospital should not be defined or standardised on birth outcome, suggesting instead that policies be flexible and that it was essential that women were consulted about the length of stay and the nature of their care.
To enable further progress, systems and protocols for isolating and characterising CTCs need to be rigorously defined and standardised, with an analysis of whether all systems identify/isolate the same cells (or indeed all CTCs, since EMT may preclude identification using epithelial markers [ 141, 161- 163]).
We aim to define, standardise and improve documentation of safe, accurate and consistent values of ABW and IBW.
To our knowledge, the process and outcome of researchers working in partnership with a remote Indigenous residential rehabilitation service to define, standardise and operationalise core treatment and organisational components has not been undertaken, or at the very least, has not been extensively published in the peer reviewed literature (James et al., 2017, under review).
The majority of respondents to our internal survey agreed that using accurate values was important, that we should define and standardise how we do this and that there was a definite need to improve performance (4).
