What is design-study?

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.

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

It finds design weaknesses before they undermine the analysis or attract reviewer criticism. It also suggests the smallest practical correction.

design-study — Skill for Claude Code by Aperivue/medsci-skills

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.

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.

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 54 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 3,438 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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00054	$0.03438
Opus 5.5	$0.00022	$0.01375
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00011	$0.00688
Haiku 4.5	$0.00005	$0.00344

Measured 27d ago against content hash ee49cc85fe95, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, 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 27d 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 · 261 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 261 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design-Study Skill

Core Review Questions

Always inspect:

The exact research question.
The analysis unit: patient, lesion, exam, study, phase, report.
The index date or decision point.
How inclusion and exclusion criteria are applied.
Any information leakage.
The reference standard or endpoint definition.
A clinically meaningful comparator.
The validation strategy.
The uncertainty reporting required.
The best-fitting reporting guideline.
Whether exposure/outcome/covariate definitions are 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

Cite a reference only with a /search-lit-confirmed DOI or PMID; mark any other [UNVERIFIED - NEEDS MANUAL CHECK]. Never invent a clinical definition, diagnostic criterion, or guideline recommendation: flag an unconfirmed one [VERIFY] and ask the user.

Workflow

Phase 1: Reconstruct the study

Extract from the protocol, draft, slides, tables, or notes: clinical problem, intended use case, population, inputs, outputs, outcome definition, and timing of variable availability.

Gate: Present the reconstructed study summary (question, analysis unit, intended use) to the user and confirm it before proceeding — a wrong reconstruction misdirects the entire validity review.

Phase 2: Check structural validity

Read a reference only when its condition holds:

File	Read it when
`references/dag_adjustment.md`	confounding control needs an explicit adjustment set
`references/target_trial_emulation.md`	the design emulates a target trial
`references/venue_accept_recipe.md`	a clinical DL / AI-validation study must decide which venue tier the achievable design can be accepted at, and the one design move that reaches the tier above (the bridge into `/find-journal`); skip when there is no publication-tier decision
`references/combine_models_ablation_design.md`	the model is built by combining / adapting / fine-tuning existing models (nnU-Net, TotalSegmentator, SAM/MedSAM, a pretrained backbone) and the comparator must be designed as an ablation; skip for a model trained de novo
`references/multi_model_comparison_design.md`	the contribution is comparing several models / architectures head-to-head and the comparison must be fair; skip for a single-model study (one model's ablation → the row above; AI-vs-human → `/design-ai-benchmarking`)
`references/segmentation_failure_characterization_design.md`	the claim is that a segmentation model is clinically usable, not that it scores well; skip when the endpoint is benchmark accuracy (metric choice → `/model-assessment`; abstention / risk–coverage → `/model-assessment`)

Read the full file on GitHub · 261 lines

Files

What ships with it

17 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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.

27d ago Changed · -16 lines · +12 tokens per session ee49cc85fe95
1mo ago Changed · -2 lines 392181a1d425
1mo 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 (353 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 54 tokens to every session and 3,438 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.

Claude Code Research Scientific biostatistics claude-skills clinical-research diagnostic-accuracy literature-review

clinical-trials-search

Search ClinicalTrials.gov with natural language queries. Find clinical trials, enrollment, and outcomes using Valyu semantic search.

beita6969/ScienceClaw · 28 tokens

shidi

A Chinese-language research assistant role that turns a user’s ideas into literature reviews, experiment plans, figures and organised data.

IcyCreamDAS/shidi-skill · 126 tokens

clinical-research

Use when designing a prospective clinical study before submission — selecting and classifying endpoints (primary / key-secondary / exploratory, with surrogate-endpoint flagging), estimating sample size and power for two-arm designs (means / proportions / survival), or scoring a study plan for feasibility and a GO /…

bestagentkits/agency-skills · 152 tokens

design-study