Quantifying how diagnostic test accuracy depends on threshold in a meta-analysis.

ABSTRACT: Tests for disease often produce a continuous measure, such as the concentration of some biomarker in a blood sample. In clinical practice, a threshold C is selected such that results, say, greater than C are declared positive and those less than C negative. Measures of test accuracy such as sensitivity and specificity depend crucially on C, and the optimal value of this threshold is usually a key question for clinical practice. Standard methods for meta-analysis of test accuracy (i) do not provide summary estimates of accuracy at each threshold, precluding selection of the optimal threshold, and furthermore, (ii) do not make use of all available data. We describe a multinomial meta-analysis model that can take any number of pairs of sensitivity and specificity from each study and explicitl

SUBMITTER: Jones HE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6856843 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature