Database?

From: "Paul S. Collier" <p.collier@qub.ac.uk> Subject: Database? Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 12:00:58 +0000 Currently we are at the early stages of a trial where clinical, dynamic and kinetic data is being collected. We are about to start entering the data into a database but would like to store the data in a way which would present the least difficulty when we subsequently start the analysis using NONMEM (i.e. we do not want to have to enter all the data a second time if this can be avoided). I would be grateful for any advice that anyone might be able to offer. Paul S. Collier ********************************************** School of Pharmacy The Queen's University of Belfast 97 Lisburn Road Belfast BT9 7BL N. Ireland, U.K Tel: +44 (0)1232 272009 FAX: +44 (0)1232 247794 Email: p.collier@qub.ac.uk http://www.qub.ac.uk/pha/index.html

From: "Bruce CHARLES" <bruce@pharmacy.uq.edu.au> Subject: Re: Database? Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1998 06:50:07 +1000 TO: P. Collier We use Excel..... It may not be one of the "classic" data base programs but has worked well with all our population data requirements so far:- 1. Easy to format and check data which is of paramount importance, particularly with hard copy. 2. Editing power is sufficient, e.g. sorting, add/delete subjects/covariates, calculating new variables such as normalised response (e.g. plasma levels on basis of dose/kg). 3. Export/import compatibility with many other programs.....Exports directly to a NONMEM input datafile (e.g. *.csv file format, text comma delimited) 4. Some reasonable graphics capability for model diagnostics, but several specialist packages are available for this, e.g. SPLUS/XPOSE, VISUAL-NM, etc. There are other features, although I'm not sure about any relational data base features (which we have never needed to use so far). Cheers, BC Bruce CHARLES, PhD Senior Lecturer School of Pharmacy The University of Queensland Brisbane, QLD Australia 4072 TEL: +61 7 336 53194 FAX: +61 7 336 51688 Email: Bruce@pharmacy.uq.edu.au

From: "Piotrovskij, Vladimir [JanBe]" <VPIOTROV@janbe.jnj.com> Subject: RE: Database? Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1998 08:16:55 +0100 Dear Dr. Collier, I use S-PLUS to prepare NONMEM data sets. UNIX version of S-PLUS is used for NONMEM installed on UNIX machine, and S-PLUS v. 4 for Windows is used for PC installation. S-PLUS allows (almost) automated merging and reshaping of raw data from clinical database in which the information is usually spread over several files. Manual work is minimized. It is easy to overview data graphically which is useful to identify outliers and errors in the raw data at the early stage of analysis. Hope this helps Vladimir ----------------------------------------- Vladimir Piotrovsky Clinical Pharmacokinetics Janssen Research Foundation 2340 Beerse, Belgium e-mail: vpiotrov@janbe.jnj.com