Evaluation of diagnostic accuracy in detecting ordered symptom statuses without a gold standard.

ABSTRACT: Our research is motivated by 2 methodological problems in assessing diagnostic accuracy of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) doctors in detecting a particular symptom whose true status has an ordinal scale and is unknown-imperfect gold standard bias and ordinal scale symptom status. In this paper, we proposed a nonparametric maximum likelihood method for estimating and comparing the accuracy of different doctors in detecting a particular symptom without a gold standard when the true symptom status had an ordered multiple class. In addition, we extended the concept of the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve to a hyper-dimensional overall accuracy for diagnostic accuracy and alternative graphs for displaying a visual result. The simulation studies showed that the proposed

SUBMITTER: Wang Z 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3114651 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature