Interlaboratory and interstudy reproducibility of a novel lateral-flow device: A statistical issue

摘要

I was interested to read the paper by N. P. Wiederhold and colleagues published in the November 2012 issue of the Journal of Clinical Microbiology (1). The authors aimed to determine interlaboratory and interstudy reproducibility as well as to assess the effect of antifungal therapy on a lateral-flow device (LFD) developed for invasive pulmonary aspergillosis (IPA) detection. They reported a good interlaboratory agreement (LFD result agreement, 97 32/33 of the serum and 78.8 26/33 of the BAL samples from infected animals) and a good interstudy agreement (1). Such a descriptive result has nothing to do with reliability and actually is one of the common mistakes in reliability analysis (2-6).