Subgroup analyses showed that disease sub-type, intervention method, comparator, subject location, trial design, trial period and outcome measure instrument made little difference in outcomes.
For comparison analysis, PHTfree was considered the reference method (comparator).
At present, manufacturers rely on the use of adequate methods (status quo), the right appropriate comparator and missing formal deficiencies to submit an indirect comparison which may be accepted by IQWiG – a methodological discussion with the current players in the system (manufacturer, IQWiG, G-BA and scientific leaders) is pending.
We compared the three non-microbiologic methods to assess effectiveness of PDC to each other and to a microbiologic comparator through three analyses: the thoroughness of disinfection cleaning (TDC) score, the concordance of clean/dirty test results with the microbiologic comparator, and test characteristics compared with the microbiologic comparator.
However, all three non-microbiologic methods demonstrated poor correlation with our microbiologic comparator and with each other.
The proposed ADC includes digital foreground calibrated comparator and a novel capacitor switching method.
The quantifications were also conducted by HPLC as a comparator and a good correlation between both analytical methods was observed, thus validating the spectrometric method (see the Supporting Information for detailed UV/Vis absorbance data and HPLC chromatograms).
Normal WT (wild-type) mice served as the comparator and fold changes were calculated using the 2(−ΔΔCt) method (Livak and Schmittgen, 2001).
Deviations between the comparator and reference machine results were sufficiently smaller than the measurement uncertainties.
Table 2 below describes two options for estimating sample size based on case/comparators ratio: 1 case/ 1 comparator and 1 case/ 4 comparators.
