A Guide to Handling Biomedical Data

Almost all medical research today involves the gathering, processing, analysis, and presentation of data. In some studies the data may be incidental and limited in quantity. In others, they may be voluminous and critical to the entire project. In particular, epidemiological studies are concerned with explaining the occurrence of disease in human populations and with exploiting explanations discovered for the development of methods to protect man against disease. Medical surveys are a key step in most epidemiological studies and usually involve large amounts of data. For this reason the discussion which follows will focus on the role of data handling in medical surveys in order to illustrate typical procedures which may be used to help ensure the validity of the data and the conclusions drawn from them.