TESTING A TEST: BEYOND SENSITIVITY AND SPECIFICITY

Course overview

In this lecture, Dr. Schmidt covers performance evaluation of diagnostic tests. Traditional performance measures such as sensitivity, specificity and ROC curves are reviewed. Reasons for differences in diagnostic studies are examined including real differences, threshold effects, sources of bias, and random variation. Shortcomings of the traditional approaches to test evaluation are also discussed and alternative approaches such as diagnostic research (vs test research), clinical trial evaluation, and cost-effectiveness evaluation are presented.