design-study

design-study is a skill for Claude Code from Aperivue/medsci-skills. It costs 42 tokens per session (4,045 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A review process for checking whether a radiology or medical AI study can answer its research question reliably. It examines the study population, measurements, comparisons, validation, data leakage, uncertainty, and reporting requirements.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to check the research question, inclusion rules, analysis unit, reference standard, comparator, validation plan, and suitable reporting guideline.
Why use it?
It finds design weaknesses before they undermine the analysis or attract reviewer criticism. It also suggests the smallest practical correction.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: model in frontmatter.

Part of the medsci-data plugin — 8 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to check the research question, inclusion rules, analysis unit, reference standard, comparator, validation plan, and suitable reporting guideline.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/design-study
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add Aperivue/medsci-skills --skill design-study
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Aperivue/medsci-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install medsci-data, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 8 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for design-study

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/design-study/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/design-study)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/design-study"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/design-study/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for design-study

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/design-study"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/design-study.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 42 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,045 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium analysis-evasion · line 1
    Suspicious Unicode normalization or mixed-script content
    Fix: Review the flagged content for security risks. Ensure no credentials, secrets, or sensitive data are exposed.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00042 $0.04045
Opus 5 $0.00021 $0.02022
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00809
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00404

Measured 9d ago against content hash 46269424deac, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

design-study scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 2 executable files (scripts/adjustment_set_challenge/verify.sh, scripts/adjustment_set_helper.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/design-study/SKILL.md · 279 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 279 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design-Study Skill

Purpose

This skill pressure-tests whether a study is answerable, interpretable, and defensible before large amounts of drafting or analysis work accumulate.

Use it when:

  • a study question is known but the analysis plan is still fluid
  • the user wants a methods sanity check
  • a manuscript feels vulnerable to reviewer criticism
  • a peer review requires explicit methodological diagnosis

Communication Rules

  • Communicate with the user in their preferred language.
  • Use English for statistical, radiologic, and reporting-guideline terminology.
  • Be direct about validity risks, but always propose the smallest feasible fix first.

Core Review Questions

Always inspect these dimensions:

  1. What is the exact research question?
  2. What is the analysis unit: patient, lesion, exam, study, phase, report?
  3. What is the index date or decision point?
  4. How are inclusion and exclusion criteria applied?
  5. Is there any information leakage?
  6. What is the reference standard or endpoint definition?
  7. What comparator is clinically meaningful?
  8. What validation strategy is used?
  9. What uncertainty reporting is required?
  10. Which reporting guideline best fits?
  11. Are exposure/outcome/covariate definitions literature-grounded, or invented ad-hoc from the data dictionary? If ad-hoc, defer to /define-variables before drafting Methods.

Standard Output

## Study Design Review
Question: ...
Study type: ...
Analysis unit: ...
Index date / prediction timepoint: ...

### Strengths
- ...

### Major validity risks
1. ...
2. ...

### Minimal fixes
- ...

### Reporting fit
- Recommended guideline: ...

### Decision
- Ready for analysis / Needs redesign / Drafting can proceed with limitations

Workflow

Phase 1: Reconstruct the study

Extract from protocol, draft, slides, tables, or notes:

  • clinical problem
  • intended use case
  • population
  • inputs
  • outputs
  • outcome definition
  • timing of variable availability

Read the full file on GitHub · 279 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 279 lines · 42 tokens per session scan A 46269424deac

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design-study is a skill published in the GitHub repository Aperivue/medsci-skills (290 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 42 tokens to every session and 4,045 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.