3.6.15 Inclusion of Women and Minorities

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Tree Star will be comparing the performance of digital gating algorithms to the currently accepted performance standard of manual gating by human technicians. Tree Star has no reason to believe that this cadre of personnel was selected with regard to any factor other than their qualifications to perform their work. In any case, filtering this subject group by some ad hoc standard of racial or gender makeup would disqualify the new group as the source of the currently accepted performance standard. The human data is not the subject of our analysis; rather it forms the baseline against which we will be comparing new data produced by software.

Tree Star will not be enrolling subjects in the usual sense when we collect our baseline data. We will be utilizing an existing cadre of trained technicians whose regular practice represents the accepted standard for performance of their analysis task. Our study will not be an analysis of their outcome but will use their performance as a baseline against which to compare our automated performance of the same task. We can report the gender and ethnic distribution of our subjects, but they are selected by their employment in the target process. Our anecdotal experience is that the number of women exceeds the number of men in this specialty, and that minorities taken together exceed Caucasians in number. No subject will be excluded for reasons of sex/gender or racial/ethnic background.