RefCurv is a software providing methods to create pediatric reference curves from data. Furthermore, it comes with a big number of features to analyze reference curves. The graphical user interface (GUI) is written in Python. RefCurv uses R and the GAMLSS add-on package as the underlying statistical engine.

Following figure shows example reference curves for Body Mass Index (BMI) over age:

The curves are based on a dataset of healthy Dutch boys. RefCurv was used to fit a model to the data points and depict it in form of percentile curves. The labels indicate the percentiles, e.g. "P3" stands for the third percentile.

This study is funded by Fördergemeinschaft Deutsche Kinderherzzentren e.V.

• Cole, T.J. (1990). The LMS method for constructing normalized growth standards. European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 44, 45-60.
• Rigby R.A. and Stasinopoulos D.M. (2005). Generalized additive models for location, scale and shape, Appl. Statist., 54, part 3, pp 507-554.
• gamlss package (CRAN)
• gamlss example dataset of Dutch boys
• Website of the GAMLSS developers
• GAMLSS on Wikipedia