Applications of Statistics to Medicine and Medical Physics

Edward L. Nickoloff

• Publisher: Medical Physics Publishing
• eBook ISBN:
  9781930524712
• Year: 2011

This book was written with two specific goals in mind. The first is as a resource for graduate students who are pursuing an advanced degree in medical physics who are also required to take a course in statistics. This text includes many practical medical physics problems which would be ideal for this course. Although there are a number of statistics books available, there are no books which present statistics in a context that has applications important to medical physics and medicine. Most medical physicists are familiar with the very basics of statistical analysis like mean and standard deviation: however their ability to analyze data and design statistically valid experiments may be limited. The second goal, therefore, is for the book to serve as a key resource on statistical analysis for senior medical physicists or clinical researchers. The book includes 11 chapters, beginning with very basic topics like Binomial, Poisson, and Normal probability distributions and gradually progressing to more advanced topics. This book is a valuable addition to any library due to the wide range of statistical topics and the many practical applications that are provided throughout the text. Medical physics graduate students would benefit from a book which addresses practical clinical topics while learning statistics rather than abstract statistical analysis that is the approach of many other statistics books.

Table of contents

• CHAPTER 1: FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS AND THEIR APPLICATIONS
• CHAPTER 2: PROBABILITY DISTRIBUTION
• CHAPTER 3: MORE DETAILS ABOUT THE NORMAL PROBABILITY DISTRIBUTIONS
• CHAPTER 4: SEPARATION OF TWO STATISTICAL POPULATIONS
• CHAPTER 5: BAYES' THEOREM
• CHAPTER 6: GRAPHICAL FITS TO MEASURED DATA
• CHAPTER 7: CORRELATION FUNCTION
• CHAPTER 8: FRACTALS AND THEIR APPLICATIONS
• CHAPTER 9: MONTE CARLO METHODS
• CHAPTER 10: APPLICATION OF STATISTICS TO IMAGE QUALITY MEASUREMENTS
• CHAPTER 11: MISUSE OF STATISTICS
• APPENDIX A: Normal Probability Distribution Table
• APPENDIX B: Two-Tailed Cumulative Normal Probability Function About the Mean Value Table
• APPENDIX C: Lower One-Tailed Cumulative Normal Probability Distribution from -∞ to X Table
• APPENDIX D: Student’s T-Test Value for Various Degrees of Freedom Table
• APPENDIX E: Significance of the Correlation Coefficient “R” Value Table
• INDEX
• About the Author