title: An adaptive approach to designing comparative diagnostic accuracy studies.
abstract: Comparative diagnostic studies usually involve comparison of the area under receiver operating characteristic curves when biomarkers are measured on a continuous or ordinal scales. In designing such studies, specification of a number of nuisance parameters is often required to compute sample sizes. When these parameters are incorrectly specified, statistical power to detect a meaningful difference in area can be substantially adversely affected. We propose an adaptive method to calculate the sample size and show these procedures to be effective in controlling error rates.
authors.affiliation: Biometry and Mathematical Statistics Branch, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Department of Health and Human Services, Rockville, Maryland 20852, USA.
authors.forename: Chengqing
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.forename: Aiyi
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Kai F
authors.initials: KF
authors.lastname: Yu
mesh_terms: D019540:Area Under Curve; D015233:Models, Statistical; D012107:Research Design; D018401:Sample Size; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity