Cost-effectiveness is typically expressed as an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio ( ICER ), the ratio of change in costs to the change in effects.

While the two conclusions of this article may indicate that industry-funded ICER measures are lower methodological quality than those published by non-industry sources, there is also a possibility that, due to the nature of retrospective or other non-public work, publication bias may exist rather than methodology biases.

ICER is a wavelet-based image compressor that allows for a graceful trade-off between the amount of compression ( expressed in terms of compressed data volume in bits / pixel ) and the resulting degradation in image quality ( distortion ).

To control the image quality and amount of compression in ICER, the user specifies a byte quota ( the nominal number of bytes to be used to store the compressed image ) and a quality level parameter ( which is essentially a quality goal ).

* ICER stops producing compressed bytes once the quality level or byte quota is met, whichever comes first.

Using ICER, when the primary concern is the bandwidth available to transmit the compressed image, one can set the quality goal to lossless and the given byte quota will determine the amount of compression obtained.

JPEG 2000 has some design commonalities with the ICER image compression format that is used to send images back from the Mars rovers.

ICER ( like JPEG 2000 ) is wavelet-based and provides

Thus ICER will have good performance on integer only CPUs like the T414 Transputer, whereas JPEG 2000 will not perform as well as it is forced into floating point emulation.

* ICER is subject to less than 1 % overshoot when byte and quality quotas are in effect.

This mode is only so far being used with the Mars Pathfinders, but may see wider implementation in the ICER standard.

The incremental cost-effectiveness ratio ( ICER ) is an equation used commonly in health economics to provide a practical approach to decision making regarding health interventions.

ICER is the ratio of the change in costs to incremental benefits of a therapeutic intervention or treatment.

The equation for ICER is:

Many people feel that basing health care interventions on cost-effectiveness is a type of health care rationing and have expressed concern that using ICER will limit the amount or types of treatments and interventions available to patients.

However, there is currently no evidence that health care systems have determined such a threshold ; without such a standard, the interpretation of ICER analyses may not be uniform.

The incremental cost-effectiveness ratio ( ICER ) is the ratio between the difference in costs and the difference in benefits of two interventions.

In North America, a similar figure of US $ 50000 per QALY is often suggested as a threshold ICER for a cost-effective intervention.

This is then used to allocate healthcare resources, with an intervention with a lower cost to QALY saved ( incremental cost effectiveness ) ratio (" ICER ") being preferred over an intervention with a higher ratio.

The method of ranking interventions on grounds of their cost per QALY gained ratio ( or ICER ) is controversial because it implies a quasi-utilitarian calculus to determine who will or will not receive treatment.

Most of the MER images are compressed with the ICER image compression software.

* ICER attempts to produce a compressed image that meets the quality level using as few compressed bytes as possible.

* ICER reverts to a separate internal LOCO ( Low Complexity Lossless Compression ) compressor for lossless image compression.

* Mars Rovers ( for ICER image files )

ICER has both lossy and lossless compression modes.

The development of ICER was driven by the desire to achieve high compression performance while meeting the specialized needs of deep space applications.

Since ICER provides a facility for automated flexibility in choosing the number of segments, compression effectiveness can be traded against packet loss protection, thereby accommodating different channel error rates.

ICER overall provides lossy compression performance

ICER-3D also inherits most of the important features of ICER, including progressive compression, the ability to perform lossless and lossy compression, and an effective error-containment scheme to limit the effects of data loss on the deep-space channel.

The Mars Science Lab supports the use of ICER for its navigation cameras ( but all other cameras use other file formats ).

* ICER in its current form does compress monochrome images better than colour images due to its origins as an internal NASA Deep Space Network file format.

* ICER, used by the Mars Rovers, related to JPEG 2000 in its use of wavelets

This contrasts with the context modeling scheme used by ICER, which makes use of previously encoded information from spatially neighboring coefficients.

When combined with the relative cost of treatment this information can be used to form an Incremental Cost-Effectiveness Ratio ( ICER ) to allow comparison of suggested expenditure against current resource use at the margin ( the cost effectiveness threshold ).

The Mars Exploration Rovers “ Spirit ” ( MER-A ) and “ Opportunity ” ( MER-B ) both use ICER.

Hewlett-Packard's Remote Graphics Software uses a video codec called HP3 ( codec ) which claims to derive from Mars Rover compression-this could be a real-time implementation of ICER.

The remaining MER images that are compressed make use of modified Low Complexity Lossless Compression ( LOCO ) software, a lossless submode of ICER.

ICER has some similarities to JPEG2000, with respect to select wavelet operations.

To achieve error containment, ICER produces the compressed bitstream in separate pieces or segments that can be decoded independently.

* JPEG 2000 uses floating point math, where ICER uses only integer math.

* JPEG 2000 implements a low complexity symmetrical wavelet lossless compressor, but ICER uses an integer only non-wavelet lossless compressor.

* ICER and JPEG 2000 encode color spaces differently.

ICER was created for low end 32 bit CPUs ( essentially embedded computers ) on spacecraft.

ICER offers a new mode called Spectral + ICER that makes possible lower rate distortion levels ( aka grey level errors ) with ICER images.