Authors' response

✍ Scribed by Karin Haustermans; Adrain Begg

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1995
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 160 KB
• Volume: 21
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0196-4763
• DOI: 10.1002/cyto.990210216

✦ Synopsis

Recently, Haustermans et al. ( 2) investigated the problem o f reproducibility of potential doubling time measurements of human tumors in two different laboratories (Amsterdam and Leuven, The Netherlands). The authors found that the variations induced by the three parts of the procedure (preparation and staining, FCM measurement, and data analysis) are significantly smaller than the intertumoral variations. In particular, they observed that the variations from the data analysis part are only small. Indeed, this statement seems to be problematic because there is no real source of variations if the participants of the study use identical evaluation models. Moreover, these models could be unsuitable or also incorrect without consequences for the observed variability of the results. But, this is exactly the case in the mentioned article. The relative movement function RM, introduced by Begg et al. ( 1) is given by the expression (FL-FG,)/(F,;2-Fcil). This is not identical with the expression reported in the mentioned article.

Secondly, the function RM is given by the equation RM = 0.5 + 0.5*t/Ts (for t < TG2) and from this Ts follows