WPCMath

advanced applications of
mathematics, statistics, and artificial intelligence to medical research,
communities, and
sustainability

William P. Coleman Mathematics -- or WPCMath -- is a purposely small professional consulting firm dedicated to developing advanced applications of mathematics, statistics, and cognition in a variety of fields having to do with building a humane and sustainable future. I am also interested in developing the capabilities of the Internet and telecommunications systems as a vehicle for these applications. A copy of my CV is posted here in PDF format.

One prominent area of my work is medicine: randomized clinical trials, clinical decision making, physiologic modeling, healthcare systems, and public health.

The methods built up in thirty years of professional work in these fields are also applicable to sustainability issues in ecology, economics, and policy studies.

If you would like me to work with you in any of these areas, please contact me:

wpc at wpcmath dot com

The first version of this site began construction on 17 Apr 97. Back then -- just after the awaited release of Netscape 4 -- my page was a pioneering use of DHTML. I was pleased that my Statistics Demonstration was selected by Netscape Communications for inclusion in its list of Dynamic HTML Resource sites.

Now I'm reconstructing the site to accommodate my new Herakleitos system -- a Python/XML framework for modeling real-world and knowledge systems, for planning actions in them, and for analyzing them using mathematics and statistics in a logical and AI setting. This will be under construction for a while.

Meanwhile, the educational and tutorial materials from the old site are being rebuilt and transferred to my weblog -- where they'll coexist with a variety of philosophical, artistic, and cultural topics that happen to interest me personally. I mean, after all, in my own life they're already mixed together.

So far, the following items are available at my blog:

• Clinical trial design — for beginners. An elementary tutorial I originally wrote as e-mails to a friend in industry management who asked me to level with him about how to oversee a clinical trial whose design he was asked to supervise. I thought other beginners might appreciate the same advice.
• Medicine: Using probability to treat people versus using it to treat groups. Some non-technical remarks about making individual decisions on health care for yourself and those you love -- as contrasted with the timeless attitude we scientists can take. How to learn from us without getting tied down.
• Health and Healthcare for Latin America and the Caribbean. During November 12-15, 1996, I was a delegate to an Expert Consultation Meeting, Telecommunications in Health and Healthcare for Latin America and the Caribbean,” held in Washington, DC by PAHO (the Pan American Health Organization), a part of WHO (the World Health Organization). The meeting was organized by the Health Services Information Systems Program of PAHO’s Division of Health Systems and Services Development. I wrote up a draft of my personal ideas for possible inclusion in our report back to PAHO. The body of this post contains my draft report.

There are also the following items available here in pdf format:

• Chapter 14. Inferential Statistics, Descriptive Statistics and The Analysis Plan. This was written for the first edition of Steven E. Linberg's book, Expediting Drug and Biologics Development, Parexel International, 1995. It's another introduction to basic statistics in clinical trials. Although not very technical, it's more formal and more comprehensive than Clinical trial design — for beginners. The theme of Steve’s book was “Target-oriented design” of clinical research. The idea is to start with the end: What are you trying to prove? What do you want the FDA to agree to? Figure out what you'd need to demonstrate in order to get that. Then figure out the scientific step before that . . . and so on, until you work your way back to the starting point where you are now.
• Healthcare Systems Process Reengineering for Developing Countries: A Report to IMIA Working Group 9. Two colleagues — Sandra Mejía Mendoza, from Nicaragua, and Alvaro Gaynicotche, from Uruguay — worked with me to develop this paper, and I presented it at MEDINFO 98 in Seoul, Korea. "To discover what kinds of health informatics the developing countries need, we look first to the underlying social structures that informatics is to support. . . . "
• Reduced Bladder and Bowel Control after Severe Spinal Cord Injury-- Even in Patients Able to Walk. Although walking and unlimited mobility are main goals for spinal-cord-injured (SCI) patients, more limited accomplishments -- such as bladder and bowel control -- would significantly improve quality of life for those lacking them. Conferences and publications have cited such endpoints as under-studied. In the 1990s, Fred Geisler and I were the designers of the Sygen multi-center trial in acute SCI. Later, we collaborated with Kim Anderson, using the data from that trial to investigate the relation between regaining the ability to walk and regaining bowel and bladder control. We found that bowel and bladder impairment, representing a serious impact on quality of life, affect a very large portion of the SCI population and are a significant problem, separate from ambulation and needing specifically directed work.

wpc at wpcmath dot com
Updated 29 Dec 07.

All text and images on this site or in its downloads are
© 1995-2007 by William P. Coleman,
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This work by William P. Coleman can be used only as specified under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0
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