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Revisiting Youden's index as a useful measure of the misclassification error in meta-analysis of diagnostic studies

Böhning, D., Böhning, W. and Holling, H. (2008) Revisiting Youden's index as a useful measure of the misclassification error in meta-analysis of diagnostic studies. Statistical Methods in Medical Research, 17 (6). pp. 543-554. ISSN 0962-2802

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To link to this item DOI: 10.1177/0962280207081867

Abstract/Summary

The paper considers meta-analysis of diagnostic studies that use a continuous Score for classification of study participants into healthy, or diseased groups. Classification is often done on the basis of a threshold or cut-off value, which might vary between Studies. Consequently, conventional meta-analysis methodology focusing solely on separate analysis of sensitivity and specificity might he confounded by a potentially unknown variation of the cut-off Value. To cope with this phenomena it is suggested to use, instead an overall estimate of the misclassification error previously suggested and used as Youden's index and; furthermore, it is argued that this index is less prone to between-study variation of cut-off values. A simple Mantel-Haenszel estimator as a summary measure of the overall misclassification error is suggested, which adjusts for a potential study effect. The measure of the misclassification error based on Youden's index is advantageous in that it easily allows an extension to a likelihood approach, which is then able to cope with unobserved heterogeneity via a nonparametric mixture model. All methods are illustrated at hand of an example on a diagnostic meta-analysis on duplex doppler ultrasound, with angiography as the standard for stroke prevention.

Item Type:Article
Refereed:Yes
Divisions:Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Mathematics and Statistics > Applied Statistics
ID Code:9755
Uncontrolled Keywords:TEST ACCURACY, TESTS, REVIEWS, NUMBER

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