The course is organised by the Department of Physiology and
Biophysics, St Mary's
Lectures:
Descriptive statistics, measures of central tendency and scatter, Gaussian distribution, standard deviation and standard error, t tests, Mann-Whitney and Wilcoxon tests, correlation and regression, Anova, 2-squared test, biometry, sources of experimental error, clinical trials, vital statistics, guest lectures on applications of statistics in classic medical studies.
Practical work:
This includes a clinical trial performed on the student group and statistical computation sessions from examples and experimental observations.
First year students during Autumn and Spring terms.
Fourteen one-hour lectures and fourteen two-hour practical and computation sessions.
Students are introduced to computers and the MINITAB statistical and WordPerfect word-processing packages from the start of the course.
Approximately 100 students attend lectures; practical sessions are duplicated as only half of the students can be accommodated at a time.
Lectures from the Departments of Physiology and Biophysics and Biology.
In-course assessment:
The students must produce a word-processed account of the clinical trial that they conduct, with full statistical analysis. A proportion of the marks for the April examination is derived from the assessment of this write-up.
Examinations:
An internal examination is held at the beginning of the second term. This takes the same form as the April and September examinations.
Students take a one-hour examination in Medical Statistics
and Biometry, as part of the MBBS (
Dr M W Rampling, Department of Physiology
and Biophysics, St Mary's
Tel: 0171 723
1252
Fax: 0171 723 7185
email: mwr32@uk.ac.ic.sm