title: Chance-corrected measures of the validity of a binary diagnostic test.
abstract: Chance-corrected measures of the validity of diagnostic tests can be a valuable supplement to traditional measures which do not take chance-agreement between diagnostic test and true disease status into account. Recently, several authors have propagated chance-corrected measures of sensitivity and specificity, the most commonly employed indices of validity of binary diagnostic tests. A major limitation of these measures is their dependence on disease prevalence. In this paper, we propose simple alternative chance-corrected measures of sensitivity and specificity which do not share this limitation. The chance-corrected measure of sensitivity can be expressed as 1--negative likelihood ratio, and the chance-corrected measure of specificity can be expressed as 1--inverse of the positive likelihood ratio. The properties of the proposed measures are described and graphically illustrated, and formulas are given for point and interval estimation of the measures.
authors.affiliation: Unit of Epidemiology, University of Ulm, Germany.
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Brenner
authors.forename: O
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Gefeller
mesh_terms: D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011933:Reagent Kits, Diagnostic / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity
chemical_list: D011933:Reagent Kits, Diagnostic