ON THE ACCURACY OF DIFFERENTIAL MEASUREMENTS OF THE MINIMAL ERYTHEMA DOSE: INFLUENCE OF THE DISCRETENESS OF THE SCALE

The minimal erythema dose (MED) is often used as a quantity by which the influence of certain treatments of the skin can be measured. Differential measurements are performed by assessing the difference of the MED on the skin treated in some way and the untreated skin.
As the MED-measuring scale is discrete, the question is sometimes raised whether it is possible to measure differences smaller than one scale unit. In the present paper it is shown that this is indeed possible; in principle the discreteness of the scale does not impose any restriction on the smallest value of the difference that can be measured. The discreteness of the scale introduces an extra random variation into the measurement. This variation is estimated theoretically. It is automatically included in the usual error analysis.
The discreteness variance is small when compared to other variance components, which are computed from an analysis of variance of actual experiments. Reducing the discreteness variance, by reducing the dose decrement of the MED-measuring scale, therefore, does not enhance the overall accuracy considerably. Finally, it is found that the assessments of the MED by the various observers do not differ significantly from each other, and that multiple assessments do increase the accuracy, especially for small effects.