Reference intervals and standard deviation scores (‘z scores’) are widely used as diagnostic tools in various biomedical fields. They are applied to laboratory parameters in clinical chemistry, psychometric tests in neurology, or parameters of children’s growth in pediatrics. Usually, samples from a ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’ population form the data basis for the estimation of reference...
Classification plays a pivotal role in medicine for both diagnostic and prognostic purposes. Traditionally, diagnostic efficacy is evaluated using prevalence-independent metrics, such as sensitivity and specificity. For numerical tests, the Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve is the standard for assessing classification success. However, the rising adoption of machine...
The accuracy of diagnostic tests is commonly evaluated by estimating the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), as well as sensitivity and specificity at given diagnostic cut-offs. However, many diagnostic trials use factorial designs. For example, different combinations of readers and methods may be used to diagnose a patient. Furthermore, diagnostic studies may...
Background
Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) represents one of the most aggressive and treatment-resistant breast cancer subtypes. Patients with locally advanced unresectable or metastatic TNBC (mTNBC) typically face a median overall survival of only 8 to 13 months, highlighting the urgent need for efficient drug evaluation strategies. Conventional statistical methods often assume...
Meta-analysis of diagnostic test accuracy (DTA) studies deals with aggregating information from multiple studies on sensitivity and specificity. Classical approaches to this task select a single pair of sensitivity and specificity per study (single threshold methods, STM), possibly ignoring additional information if studies report results on multiple diagnostic thresholds. In recent years,...
