title: How many raters? Toward the most reliable diagnostic consensus.
abstract: When faced with a decision whether or not to treat a patient, to enter or to withdraw a patient from a clinical trial, or any other such binary decision, based on diagnosis with unsatisfactory reliability, can a consensus diagnosis be used to improve reliability? If so, exactly how? That is the question I address here. I draw comparisons and contrasts between the known results with an interval consensus and those with a binary consensus and suggest tactics for use in a pilot study to answer the above questions.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, CA 94306.
authors.forename: H C
authors.initials: HC
authors.lastname: Kraemer
mesh_terms: D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic / Q000379:methods / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D003657:Decision Making; D003933:Diagnosis; D006801:Humans; D015233:Models, Statistical; D010865:Pilot Projects; D012107:Research Design; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity