Experimental Design and Statistics in Biomedical Research

Résumé du livre

Animal experiments are usually done to discover something about the biology of, for example, the species, strain, or sex being studied and indirectly to infer something about humans or other target species. Thus, laboratory animals are usually used as "models" of some other species. The use of models involves the following three distinct steps: 1) choice of a suitable model, based on our current knowledge about disease processes in the target species and in potential model organisms; 2) one or more experiments to indicate how the model responds to any applied treatments; and 3) consideration of the relevance of the results for the target species. This issue of ILAR Journal is concerned with the second step, design and analysis of experiments using animals that have already been chosen as likely to be informative indirectly about the target species.