| Abstract: | Acute radiation injury and postirradiation recovery have been formalized in terms of a Markovian homogeneous process of the random walk with a finite set of states, two absorbing barriers and continuous time. The distribution of time for such a process to reach (for the first time) the upper absorbing barrier was earlier obtained by SAATY (1961) and within the proposed model it coincides with the life span distribution for irradiated animals. The possibilities of finding the maximum likelihood estimates of unknown parameters are investigated by means of simulating experiments performed with a computer assistance. On the basis of simulation results the applicability of the proposed distribution for the purposes of survival data analysis is discussed. Extension of the model to accomodate two (or more) radiation syndromes is presented. |
