Abstract
Statistical Package for Medical Science, called by the acronym of SPMS, is an integrated statistical data analysis system designed especially for medical research. SPMS was elaborated to facilitate a close, multipurpose study of medical data adopting the central design concept that many different statistical operations may be run freely on the data. Once the user enters the raw data into the SPMS data file, a variety of related tasks, e. g., generation of new items, static and dynamic case selections, advanced statistical analyses, storage of computed results like factor scores and so on, can be carried out in any sequence.
Compared with other existing well-known packages such as BMDP, SAS and SPSS, the distinctive features of SPMS are (1) capability of treating three-dimensional data structures, (2) pliable transformation of data structures, (3) flexible data stratifications, (4) continuity, connectivity and repeatability, (5) easy-to-implement user's own coded programs, and (6) easy-to-use control language.
Since the beginning of its development, SPMS has been utilized in a service capacity to store and analyze medical data with various structures collected mostly in Tokyo Metropolitan Hospitals and maternity hospitals. On the basis of these experiences, necessary modifications and extensions have been made so that SPMS might immediately cope with practical requests for medical data analysis.
