Expert Decision-making in Exposure Assessment

描述（由申请人提供）：通常，没有足够的测量数据来正确描述类似接触组工人的接触情况。在这种情况下，职业卫生学家利用其专业判断和其他定性和半定量信息，在作出决定时补充实际接触测量结果。显然需要验证这种对暴露的主观评估，并制定一个逻辑上连贯的框架，将这些主观判断与实际暴露测量相结合，从而利用两种信息来源。拟议的研究的总体目标是开发和验证一个有效的，基于性能的暴露评估策略，结合主观判断和实际测量，并达到正确的决策使用最少的测量。本研究的具体目标是：（1）评估专业医学家对暴露的主观评估的准确性;（2）确定准确的主观评估的决定因素， （3）建立一个贝叶斯概率框架，用于有效地对暴露进行决策，该框架将实际监测数据与暴露的主观估计相结合，以使用最少的测量次数做出正确的决策。该方法将使用来自3 M公司的大型职业暴露数据集以及从3 M公司雇用的职业卫生学家获得的概率专业判断来开发。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Frequently, insufficient measurements are available for properly characterizing the exposure profiles of similarly exposed groups (SEGs) of workers. In such circumstances, occupational hygienists use their professional judgment and other qualitative and semi-quantitative information to supplement the actual exposure measurements in arriving at decisions. There is clearly a need to validate such subjective assessments of exposure and develop a logically coherent framework that integrates these subjective judgments with actual exposure measurements, and thus leverage both sources of information. The overall goal of the proposed research is to develop and validate an efficient, performance-based exposure assessment strategy that combines subjective judgments and actual measurements, and arrives at the correct decision using the least number of measurements. The specific goals of the research are: (1) to assess the accuracy of subjective assessments of exposure by professional hygienists; (2) to identify the determinants of accurate subjective assessments of exposure by occupational hygienists (such as seniority, exposure assessment experience, educational backgrounds), and to determine the sensitivity of their subjective exposure assessments to these determinants; (3) to develop a Bayesian probabilistic framework for efficient decision making regarding exposures that integrates actual monitoring data and subjective estimates of exposures to arrive at correct decisions using the least number of measurements. The methodology will be developed using a large occupational exposure dataset from 3M Company, and probabilistic professional judgments obtained from occupational hygienists employed at 3M Company.