Copyright © 1988 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

A statistically significant difference in mean values between two laboratory quantitation methods is interpreted as a bias. Sometimes such a difference is so minute that it does not constitute any practical concern. An alternative approach is to test statistically whether the two methods are close enough, not for equality. This is to look at the confidence interval of the mean method difference and does not entail any additional statistical tests.