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OpenEpi & BrightStat: Biostatistics On Demand Print
Written by Massoud Toussi   

A variety of biostatistics software suits are available around to complicate our choice of the software to downlaod, install and use. Wikipedia provides a very useful comparison page to help you make your choice. Of course, some packages like the free R programming language, and the commercial SASl, are still the best "professional" solutions, but their rather flat learning curve limits their usage by doctors and some professionals of biomedical research.

If you do not want to pay and you search a general purpose solution, then EpiInfo, AM Statistical Software, PSPP and MicroIris are some good choices. All of these programs need to be downloaded and installed before you are able to use them, and some of them are not simply portable. However, a new concept in this regard has emerged which is the on-demand software for statistics. Is fas as I know, the concept began with OpenEpi, a very useful and online statistical software provided freely to everyone. The software helps you do some calculations and especially learns you a lot of things about epidemiology and biostatistics without even needing to login. The source code is also available free of charge for your local use. I downloaded and installed the source code and it worked with no problem: already a good score for a downloadable online program.

Another, more complete solution is BrightStat (pay attention not to get hunted by BrightStats). The software is created by Dr Daniel Stricker from the University of Bern, Switzerland. It provides a clean and modern user interface based on Flash. The application itself is apparently written in PHP and MySQL. You may upload your data to the application and make some data management work on them. The software let's you do a variety of statistical tests, including descriptive analysis, Chi square, Binomial, ANOVA, Logistic regression, Kaplan Meier, etc. It also produces principal graphics, including Boxplots. I uploaded a database of 1600 records with 48 attributes each. The database was in a flat Excel sheet and was imported without any problem. The interface for data management and variable creation worked nicely, and descriptive analyses produced some nice looking reports. I tried some graphics works and it woked very well - even better than some installed counterparts. I congratulate the author of this software frankly for his clean work. I am confident the software will find good appreciation in medical community, provided that it is hosted on a more powerful server. In fact, for some more complex calculations it simply created time out errors. I suppose BrightStat is written in wholly in PHP. I am not sure if it is the best language to use for such a this software (I would suggest Python programming language or JSP). In anyway, this is a great work and I propose you to test it.

OpenEpi website: http://www.openepi.com/menu/openEpiMenu.htm

BrightStat website: http://brightstat.com/index.php