Quality assurance kappa: field testing of a prototypical softwareprogram for evaluation of intraoperative transesophagealechocardiography skills

摘要

The authors have developed software (Q/A Kappa), involving a400-line source code, capable of directly reporting Kappa correlationcoefficient values for systematic assessment of the validity ofintraoperative anesthesiology based echocardiographic interpretations,using external reviewer interpretations as the “goldstandard”. This study presents results of field testing of thisprototypical software. Data, derived from consecutive cardiac surgerypatients, consisted of standardized two-dimensional echocardiographicand color flow Doppler imaging sequences. Intraoperative and off-lineTEE interpretations were compared using the Q/A Kappa program. Thesedata (480 interpretations) were also manually integrated into theequation required for calculation of values of the variable kappacorrelation coefficient. The relationship between Q/A Kappa-derivedvalues and manually-calculated values was significant (P<0.001,r=1.0). This result indicates successful seamless functioning of thissoftware program from data entry, through segmentation into tables, tovalid statistical analysis calculations