title: Estimating viral concentrations from dilution counts: an improved HP48SX version of the 'MLE2' program.
abstract: The recent withdrawal of the HP41C* calculator from the market necessitated a translation of the HP41C* 'MLE2' program published earlier (Roussel and Husson, 1991) into a version for its successor, the HP48SX. The existence of the HP41CV emulator module for the HP48SX offers no solution for continued support of the 'MLE2' program, because it does not accept synthetic HP41C instructions (cf. 'Warning' paragraph in (Roussel and Husson, 1991)). Moreover, the built-in HP48SX upper-tail probability functions (UTPC UTPF UTPN) are more accurate than the corresponding HP41C subprograms. The easy interfacing capabilities of the HP48SX with PC or Macintosh make transfer of the program itself, and its output (e.g. for reporting) straight-forward. This calls for a specific HP48SX implementation with ASCII text output of the algorithm presented by Roberts and Coote (1965), and extended by Roussel and Husson (1991). Finally, the probability distribution of the particle concentration lambda as a function of a given set of counts is shown to be chi 2, so that exact confidence bounds for lambda can be computed using the HP48SX UTPC and ROOT commands.
authors.affiliation: IMEC, Department MAP/ARS, Heverlee, Belgium.
authors.forename: P J
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: Roussel
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Husson
mesh_terms: D011336:Probability; D012984:Software; D014780:Viruses / Q000254:growth & development* / Q000302:isolation & purification