[Prognostication of individual radiation sensitivity of animals, based on the use of a mathematical method of object...

A statistical method of object classification based on the use of linear discriminant analysis, was employed to solve the problem of prediction of the outcome of acute radiation disease. In experiments on 23 monkeys irradiated at a dose of 5.3 Gy 14 animals had survived and 9 perished. The initial state and early response (in 5 h) to gamma-beam radiation were assessed. The total number of the analyzed parameters was 16. According to the experimental results an integral index--discriminator--was computed for each object. Values for the survivors ranged within 136.1-151.3, and for 9 more radiosensitive animals the values of discriminators turned out to be higher (151.9-168.7). The procedure of prognosis was the following. 23 monkeys were randomly divided into 2 groups (using the table of random numbers). The 1st group (a study sample) included 13 animals, of them 8 survived and 5 perished. The 2nd group (a control predictor sample) included 10 animals, of them 6 survived and 4 perished by the end of the experiment. The authors described 3 variants of a random selection of the animals both for the 1st and 2nd groups. The results of prognosis were compared with the experimental results. Erroneous prognosis for each variant was 10, 0 and 20%, respectively.