Bücher von Luigi Salmaso

This book covers some biostatistical methods and several case studies useful to interpret and analyze dental research in the areas of orofacial pain and temporomandibular disorders. It will guide practitioners in these fields who would like to interpret research findings or find examples on the design of clinical investigations. After an introduction dealing with the basic issues, the central sections of the textbook are dedicated to the different types of investigations in sight of specific goals researchers may have. The final section contains a recent approach based on nonparametric permutation tests which can be adopted in many practical situations. The field of orofacial pain and temporomandibular disorders is emerging as one of the most critical areas of clinical research in dentistry. Due to the complexity of clinical pictures, the multifactorial etiology, and the importance of psychosocial factors in all aspects of the TMD practice, clinicians often find it hard to appraise their modus operandi, and researchers must constantly increase their knowledge in epidemiology and medical statistics. Indeed, proper methodological designs are fundamental to reaching high levels of internal and external validity of findings in this specific area.

Statistical shape analysis is a geometrical analysis from a set of shapes in which statistics are measured to describe geometrical properties from similar shapes or different groups, for instance, the difference between male and female Gorilla skull shapes, normal and pathological bone shapes, etc. Some of the important aspects of shape analysis are to obtain a measure of distance between shapes, to estimate average shapes from a (possibly random) sample and to estimate shape variability in a sample[1]. One of the main methods used is principal component analysis. Specific applications of shape analysis may be found in archaeology, architecture, biology, geography, geology, agriculture, genetics, medical imaging, security applications such as face recognition, entertainment industry (movies, games), computer-aided design and manufacturing. This is a proposal for a new Brief on statistical shape analysis and the various new parametric and non-parametric methods utilized to facilitate shape analysis.

This book considers specific inferential issues arising from the analysis of dynamic shapes with the attempt to solve the problems at hand using probability models and nonparametric tests.

The purpose of this book is to illustrate a new statistical approach to test allelic association and genotype-specific effects in the genetic study of diseases.