They also cite the emotional trauma of a false positive, which would lead to other tests.
All the others had false positive results, which means they had no clinical abnormalities on their cervix.
He said Williams, 36, may have been the victim of a false positive when tested 16 years ago.
The researchers also found there were no false positive results - where cancer is inaccurately thought to be present.
One false positive and each pill bottle would have to be examined by hand--no improvement over current bar-coding technology.
In part due to the nature of static analysis, about 15% of the bugs Coverity finds are false positive.
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Such "false positive" lies are delivered 10 to 20 times more often than spurious denials of culpability, according to DePaulo's research.
Given that history, the odds were pretty high back in 1989 that the test result he received was a false positive.
The real false positive rate for this test is not known yet.
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The test is pretty reliable at detecting the disease, returning a false positive in just 1 in 5, 000 tests (a 99.98 percent accuracy).
Note that this research was directed at finding false positive reviews.
They suggest that testing the serum of patients alone is not enough and the false positive results could be avoided by adding urine tests as well.
Authorities noted that false positive tests for ricin are common.
The probability of a false positive in a chemical assay for a drug or poison (something appearing to show up when it isn't really there) is reasonably well known.
One problem is that it is amazingly easy to get false positive results when scanning through complicated data sets and searching in the dark for correlations between genes and disease.
By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor.
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While these tests can detect cancer, they also can produce false positive results that lead to unnecessary and uncomfortable biopsies and treatments that carry undesirable side effects such as impotence and urinary incontinence.
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The Consumer Product Safety Commission said that they didn't find home test kits useful for detecting lead because in their test, they found too many false negatives and a few false positive test results.
Authorities say they have no reason to believe the suspect letters are related to the bombing attack at the Boston Marathon on Monday, and they noted that false positive tests for ricin are common.
Although the contaminated bills do not affect health, Negrusz said, they could cause in a false positive drug test if a person, such as a law enforcement officer or banker, handles contaminated currency repeatedly.
Mark Monitor's Fred Felman says that his group targets more than 500 sites in a typical week and has never had a "false positive, "--in other words, has never mistaken a legitimate site for a phisher.
And it produces a false positive fewer than three times in a million tries--compared with a hundred false positives in a million tries for an automated digital microscope on its own, the current, most accurate method.
If businesses choose, they can opt for single-factor authentication, though two-factor security is also an option -- as unique as the veins in your palm are, it's still possible for the reader to register a false positive.
The benefit was statistically significant, but the fact that the trial wasn't designed specifically to show it and the small size of the study (Taxotere was tested in 1, 000 men) increase the risk that the result is a false positive.
But since then, other analyses have shown the sensitive testing can sometimes have a false-positive.
Many yield lots of false-positive results, which lead to unnecessary (and risky) treatments.
Patients with high BMIs or with chest pain or pressure at presentation were less likely to have a false-positive activation.
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But false-positive results raise the specter that women could choose to terminate healthy pregnancies if they don't receive appropriate follow-up care.
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