THE USE OF CRITICAL REVIEWS AND META-ANALYSIS OF DIAGNOSTIC TEST EVALUATIONS - ILLUSTRATED BY DIAGNOSTIC TESTS FOR PARATUBERCULOSIS

摘要

This study presents summary receiver operating characteristics (SROC) analysis as a means to synthesise information from diagnostic test evaluation studies. Using data from a review of diagnostic tests for ante-mortem diagnosis of paratuberculosis, SROC and hierarchical SROC (HSROC) analysis were used to estimate overall diagnostic accuracies of antibody ELISAs for bovine paratuberculosis while accounting for covariates such as the target condition used in the test evaluation. The methods gave comparable results, considering the small sample size and the quality of the data. For both methods, the area under the (H)SROC curve was calculated and the results were similar. The SROC model does not take differences in sample size between study units intoaccount, whereas the HSROC allows for both between and within study variation. While the SROC is easier to implement, analyse and interpret, the HSROC does have properties which might encourage the extra effort involved in the analysis.