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Motivation: Animal models play a pivotal role in translation biomedical research. The scientific value of an animal model depends on how accurately it mimics the human disease. In principle, microarrays collect the necessary data to evaluate the transcriptomic fidelity of an animal model in terms of the similarity of expression with the human disease. However, statistical methods for this purpose are lacking., Results: We develop the agreement of differential expression (AGDEX) procedure to measure and determine the statistical significance of the similarity of the results of two experiments that measure differential expression across two groups. AGDEX defines a metric of agreement and determines statistical significance by permutation of each experiment's group labels. Additionally, AGDEX performs a comprehensive permutation-based analysis of differential expression for each experiment, including gene-set analyses and meta-analytic integration of results across studies. As an example, we show how AGDEX was recently used to evaluate the similarity of the transcriptome of a novel model of the brain tumor ependymoma in mice to that of a subtype of the human disease. This result, combined with other observations, helped us to infer the cell of origin of this devastating human cancer., Availability: An R package is currently available from www.stjuderesearch.org/site/depts/biostats/agdex and will shortly be available from www.bioconductor.org.

Background: Clinical and service evaluation often fails to accommodate sufficiently to parental perspectives and priorities concerning health interventions. Although parent satisfaction questionnaires are widely used, these assess issues chosen by the researcher. Quality of life research methods, however, can assess individual priorities., Methods: A Schedule for Evaluation of Quality of Life was adapted to record the nature, and relative importance of parental concerns about their child before child psychiatric hospital admission. Level of concern or worry was assessed pre- and post-admission, and at 1 year follow-up, with a waiting-list control. Data were analysed qualitatively and quantitatively for individuals and groups of cases., Results: The adapted instrument was feasible and clinically useful. It did not show repeated measurement effects but was sensitive to the effects of intervention (hospital admission). Effects (reduction in levels of concern) remained evident at 1 year follow-up., Conclusion: The instrument is brief, non-intrusive, and sensitive to change. It has utility for clinical case evaluation. It may complement satisfaction questionnaires, and has advantages over rating scales for the evaluation of treatment outcomes.