Application of Receiver Operating Characteristic(ROC) Curves for Clinical Diagnostic Tests

초록

Diagnostic tests often require the determination of cut-off values that discriminate uninfected from infected individuals. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve has been frequently used to attain this purpose and gives a representation of diagnostic accuracy (sensitivity and specificity) of a prediction model when varying the cut-point of a decision rule on a whole spectrum. We have written and tested a visual basic application program in EXCEL for maximum likelihood estimation of a binormal ROC curve, which also computes univariate statistics of a diagnostic test employed. Examples applying for computed tomographic images in radiology and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus research are given to illustrate this approach. This stand-alone module is available from the first author on request.

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