The diagnosis of Legionnaires' disease (LD) is based on the isolation of Legionella spp., a 4-fold rise in antibodies, a positive urinary antigen (UA), or direct immunofluorescence tests. PCR is not accepted as a diagnostic tool for LD. This systematic review assesses the diagnostic accuracy of PCR in various clinical samples with a direct comparison versus UA. We included prospective or retros...

OBJECTIVE We performed a systematic review of the accuracy of patient self-report of stroke to inform approaches to ascertaining and confirming stroke cases in large prospective studies. METHODS We sought studies comparing patient self-report against a reference standard for stroke. We extracted data on survey method(s), response rates, participant characteristics, the reference standard used...

OBJECTIVES The primary objective of this systematic review was to determine the accuracy of point-of-care ultrasonography (POCUS) in diagnosing abscess in emergency department (ED) patients with skin and soft tissue infections (SSTI). The secondary objective was the accuracy of POCUS in the paediatric population subgroup. SETTING Prospective studies set in emergency departments. PARTICIPANT...

OBJECTIVES Calcium pyrophosphate crystal deposition disease (CPPD) is common, yet prevalence and overall clinical impact remain unclear. Sensitivity and specificity of CPPD reference standards (conventional crystal analysis (CCA) and radiography (CR)) were meta-analysed by EULAR (published 2011). Since then, new diagnostic modalities are emerging. Hence, we updated 2009-2016 literature findings...

One of the leading causes cancer deaths is esophageal (EC) because identifying it in early stage challenging. Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) could detect stages EC have been developed recent years. Therefore, this study, complete meta-analysis selected studies that only uses hyperspectral imaging to evaluated terms their diagnostic test accuracy (DTA). Eight are chosen based on Quadas-2 tool re...

Background: The last decade was marked by increased neuroscience research involving machine Learning (ML) and medical images such as functional magnetic resonance electroencephalogram (EEG). There are many challenges in this field, including the need for more data a standard presenting results. Since ML models tend to be sensitive input data, different strategies acquisition, preprocessing, fea...

Methods: We conducted a systematic review based on PRISMA protocol. To find all citations, PubMed /Medline, ISI web of knowledge, EMBASE and Cochrane library databases were searched from their beginning to June 2015. Two authors, applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria, screened all citations and abstracts and extracted all needed information from included literatures, independently. In o...

Abstract Background Administrative healthcare data are frequently used to study cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk in women with hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (HDP); however, little is known about the validity case-finding definitions (CFDs, e.g., International Classification Disease codes/algorithms) designed identify these conditions administrative databases. Purpose To systematically an...

PURPOSE This meta-analysis aimed to evaluate the performance of diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DWI) in identification of colorectal cancer. METHODS A systematic literature search was performed for studies that evaluated the diagnostic accuracy of DWI in identification of colorectal cancer. Methodological quality was assessed by Quality Assessment for Studies of Diagnostic Accu...

Systematic reviews of diagnostic accuracy studies allow calculation of pooled estimates of accuracy with increased precision and examination of differences in accuracy between tests or subgroups of studies. Recently, several advances have been made in the methods used in performing systematic reviews of diagnostic test accuracy studies, most notably in how to assess the methodological quality o...