EPICURE was developed from the original AMFIT and PYTAB programs written by Dale Preston and Don Pierce for analyses of data on radiation effects in atomic bomb survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The EPICURE version of PECAN is the result of integrating an enhanced version of Jay Lubin's PECAN algorithm into a program for fitting generalized nonlinear models to binary/binomial data GMBO/PECAN and PEANUTS were developed by Dale Preston and Jay Lubin to provide a more complete range of risk regression programs for this package.
In the years since the first versions of these programs were written, many people have made important contributions to this project. We are grateful to our colleagues in the U.S. and Japan who have used early versions of the programs and made many suggestions for improvements. We are especially grateful to John Boice, Norm Breslow, David Hoel, Jill Ohara, Duncan Thomas, and Michael Vaeth for their support and encouragement. The late Alexander Kozyrev, did an amazing job of developing the initial windows user-interface and converting the original FORTRAN code into the C++ code that served as the basis for the current version. More recently, Brian Moroz has made major contributions that helped turn vague ideas into working code. Mary McConney's organizational zeal managed to make this diffuse enterprise into something like a real business for more than 20 years. Since acquiring EPICURE, Todd Ruthman and Daniel Krewski of Risk Sciences International have encouraged and supported the continued development of the program.
We would also like to acknowledge the many users who asked questions and made suggestions that have led to the improvement of this software.
Dale Preston, Jay Lubin, Don Pierce
HiroSoft International