Incorporating Mortality in Health Utility Measures.

The creation of multiattribute health utility systems requires design choices that have profound effects on the utility model, many of which have been documented and studied in the literature. Here we describe one design choice that has, to the best of our knowledge, been unrecognized and therefore ignored. It can emerge in any multiattribute decision analysis in which one or more essential outcomes cannot be described in terms of the multiattribute space.

Commentary. In Praise of Studies That Use More Than One Generic Preference-Based Measure.

Objectives And Background: Generic preference-based (GPB) measures of health-related quality of life (HRQL) are widely used as outcome measures in cost-effectiveness and cost-utility analyses (CEA, CUA). Health technology assessment agencies favor GPB measures because they facilitate comparisons among conditions and because the scoring functions for these measures are based on community preferences. However, there is no gold standard HRQL measure, scores generated by GPB measures may differ importantly, and changes in scores may fail to detect important changes in HRQL.

What were they thinking when providing preference measurements for generic health states? The evidence for HUI3.

Background: Multi-attribute generic preference-based measures of health-related quality of life are used as comprehensive outcome measures. Typically preferences for health states defined by these systems are elicited from a representative sample of the general population. An important element in that elicitation process is the information that respondents were instructed to consider in providing their responses.

The Chemistry Development Kit (CDK) v2.0: atom typing, depiction, molecular formulas, and substructure searching.

Background: The Chemistry Development Kit (CDK) is a widely used open source cheminformatics toolkit, providing data structures to represent chemical concepts along with methods to manipulate such structures and perform computations on them. The library implements a wide variety of cheminformatics algorithms ranging from chemical structure canonicalization to molecular descriptor calculations and pharmacophore perception. It is used in drug discovery, metabolomics, and toxicology.