title: RefVal: a program implementing the recommendations of the International Federation of Clinical Chemistry on the statistical treatment of reference values.
abstract: RefVal is a computer program that implements the recommendations of the International Federation of Clinical Chemistry on the statistical treatment of reference values. The program performs the following main tasks: graphical display of the distribution of reference values, identification or elimination of outliers, testing of the fit of the distribution to Gaussian shape (coefficients of skewness and kurtosis, Anderson-Darling's test, Cramér-von Mises' test, Kolmogorov-Smirnov's test), non-parametric and parametric estimation of reference limits (fractiles, percentiles). The parametric estimation method is based on a two-stage mathematical transformation of data: (1) Manly's exponential transformation (to remove skewness) and (2) John and Draper's modulus transformation (to adjust for remaining kurtosis). The program exists in different versions. The paper describes two of these: (1) a library of FORTRAN functions and subroutines and (2) a Pascal PC program that runs under MS-DOS.
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical Chemistry, Rikshospitalet, Oslo, Norway.
authors.forename: H E
authors.initials: HE
authors.lastname: Solberg
mesh_terms: D015982:Bias; D002624:Chemistry, Clinical / Q000592:standards*; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D007390:International Agencies; D009716:Numerical Analysis, Computer-Assisted; D011381:Programming Languages; D012015:Reference Standards; D012986:Software Validation; D018709:Statistics, Nonparametric