Statistical tools used in medical research

In medical research, there is a massive universe of statistical techniques. The variations between these programs are in their simplicity of use and presentation, as well as differences in license (proprietary or not), interface (point-and-click or command line), and cost (free or paid). These programs take care of the whole process of gathering, organizing, analyzing, and interpreting statistical data. Let’s look at the top ten statistical tools that scientists, clinicians, and industry R&D experts utilize in medical research.

1. Stata

   Stata is a comprehensive toolset that includes data management, data analysis, and a user-friendly graphical interface. Stata is a policy statistics program used by organizations such as the United Nations, governments, and academicians for public health.

2. R

   R is an open-source statistical software tool that can handle visualization, analysis, and parts of machine learning heavy computing, and it is strictly a programming command-line interface (CLI) software tool.

3. GraphPad Prism

   Academic and industrial biologists widely use GraphPad Prism. It also has features that allow researchers to use the t-test, one-way ANOVA, contingency tables, survival analysis, and probability models like logistic regression for laboratory research and clinical trial testing.

4. SAS

   SAS is the foundation of advanced analytics, with features that span many scientific and technical businesses and organizations.

5. IBM SPSS

   The first version of SPSS was created in 1968 and was acquired by IBM in 2009. IBM SPSS is a very comprehensive program used by professionals across virtually all disciplines.

6. MATLAB

   Published by MathWorks in 1984, MATLAB is widely used by scientists and engineers as a comprehensive programming language and command-line interface (CLI) environment.

7. JMP

   JMP combines sophisticated statistical analysis with dynamic visualizations. Its interactive approach helps users uncover insights that are difficult to obtain from static graphs or raw data tables.

8. Minitab

   Minitab was created in 1972 from OMNITAB 80 and includes a wide range of both basic and advanced statistical techniques for data analysis.

9. Statistica

   Statistica is an analytics software package developed by StatSoft. It was acquired by Dell in 2014, and later by TIBCO in 2017.

10. Excel

    Microsoft Excel was designed with data management in mind and remains one of the most widely used tools for statistical analysis and data handling.