Related papers: Statistical issues in Serial Killer Nurse cases
Justice systems are sometimes called upon to evaluate cases in which health-care professionals are suspected of killing their patients illegally. These cases are difficult to evaluate because they involve at least two levels of uncertainty.…
We discuss the statistics involved in the legal case of the nurse Lucia de B. in The Netherlands, 2003-2004. Lucia de B. witnessed an unusually high number of incidents during her shifts, and the question arose as to whether this could be…
The nurse Lucia de Berk was convicted by the Dutch courts as a serial killer with 7 murders and 3 attempts at murder in three hospitals where she worked. The nurse however always professed her innocence and indeed was never observed in such…
Statistical analysis of monthly rates of events in around 20 hospitals and over a period of about 10 years shows that respiratory arrest, though about five times less frequent than cardio-respiratory arrest, is a common occurrence in the…
This paper discusses wrongful convictions in a medical setting, focusing on nurses. Common features are lack of strong direct evidence: the nurse was never seen doing anything wrong. There is no DNA evidence of tampering of apparatus or…
Suspicions about medical murder sometimes arise due to a surprising or unexpected series of events, such as an apparently unusual number of deaths among patients under the care of a particular nurse. But also a single disturbing event might…
In the conviction of Lucia de Berk an important role was played by a simple hypergeometric model, used by the expert consulted by the court, which produced very small probabilities of occurrences of certain numbers of incidents. We want to…
This paper describes a Genetic Algorithms approach to a manpower-scheduling problem arising at a major UK hospital. Although Genetic Algorithms have been successfully used for similar problems in the past, they always had to overcome the…
A crucial step within secondary analysis of electronic health records (EHRs) is to identify the patient cohort under investigation. While EHRs contain medical billing codes that aim to represent the conditions and treatments patients may…
The wealth of computerised medical information becoming readily available presents the opportunity to examine patterns of illnesses, therapies and responses. These patterns may be able to predict illnesses that a patient is likely to…
Nurses should rely on the best evidence, but tend to struggle with statistics, impeding research integration into clinical practice. Statistical significance, a key concept in classical statistics, and its primary metric, the p-value, are…
Relevant research has been highlighted in the computing community to develop machine learning models capable of predicting the occurrence of crimes, analyzing contexts of crimes, extracting profiles of individuals linked to crime, and…
Handling of missed data is one of the main tasks in data preprocessing especially in large public service datasets. We have analysed data from the Trauma Audit and Research Network (TARN) database, the largest trauma database in Europe. For…
In recent years genetic algorithms have emerged as a useful tool for the heuristic solution of complex discrete optimisation problems. In particular there has been considerable interest in their use in tackling problems arising in the areas…
BACKGROUND: Analytical techniques are being implemented with increasing frequency to improve the management of surgical departments and to ensure that decisions are well-informed. Often these analytical techniques rely on the validity of…
We define data analyses to monitor a change in R, the average number of secondary cases caused by a typical infected individual. The input dataset consists of incident cases partitioned into outbreaks, each initiated from a single index…
The persistent issue of wrongful convictions in the United States emphasizes the need for scrutiny and improvement of the criminal justice system. While statistical methods for the evaluation of forensic evidence, including glass,…
As AI systems become an increasing part of people's everyday lives, it becomes ever more important that they understand people's ethical norms. Motivated by descriptive ethics, a field of study that focuses on people's descriptive judgments…
Preventable medical errors are estimated to be among the leading causes of injury and death in the United States. To prevent such errors, healthcare systems have implemented patient safety and incident reporting systems. These systems…
This paper discusses different needs and approaches to establishing ``causation'' that are relevant in legal cases involving statistical input based on epidemiological (or more generally observational or population-based) information. We…