Covariate-specific time-dependent ROC curves are often used to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of a biomarker with time-to-event outcomes, when certain covariates have an impact on the test accuracy. In many medical studies, measurements of biomarkers are subject to missingness due to high cost or limitation of technology. This article considers estimation of covariate-specific time-dependent ...

INTRODUCTION We examined the design, analysis and reporting in multi-reader multi-case (MRMC) research studies using the area under the receiver-operating curve (ROC AUC) as a measure of diagnostic performance. METHODS We performed a systematic literature review from 2005 to 2013 inclusive to identify a minimum 50 studies. Articles of diagnostic test accuracy in humans were identified via the...

Introduction. The association between the level of systemic inflammation and systemic hypertension (sHTN) among subjects with sarcoidosis has not been previously explored. Methods. A retrospective study was conducted to investigate the relation between the level of systemic inflammation in sarcoidosis, measured by various serum inflammatory markers, and sHTN. Results. Among a total of 108 cases...

BACKGROUND many instruments are available to identify frail older adults who may benefit from geriatric interventions. Most of those instruments are time-consuming and difficult to use in primary care. OBJECTIVE to select a valid instrument to identify frail older adults in primary care, five simple instruments were compared. METHODS instruments included clinical judgement of the general pr...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study is to assess the efficacy of cervical interleukin-6 (IL-6) compared with cervical length and its association in the prediction of preterm delivery in symptomatic women. STUDY DESIGN Observational prospective study was performed at Hospital Universitario La Fe, Valencia (Spain). SAMPLE 100 women between 24 and 34 weeks gestational age, with threatened preterm ...

BACKGROUND Breastfeeding self-efficacy can be measured with the Breastfeeding Self-Efficacy Scale-Short Form (BSES-SF). Mothers with low BSES-SF scores stop exclusive breastfeeding prematurely, but specific interventions can prevent that undesirable outcome. Because those interventions can be expensive, often one must decide which mothers will receive them. For that purpose, a cut-off BSES-SF s...

Area under an ROC curve plays an important role in estimating discrimination performance – a well-known theorem by Green (1964) states that ROC area equals the percentage of correct in two-alternative forcedchoice setting. When only single data point is available, the upper and lower bound of discrimination performance can be constructed based on the maximum and minimum area of legitimate ROC c...

BACKGROUND Teenage pregnancy is a known social problem which has been previously described using a number of deprivation measures. This study aimed to explore the temporal patterns of teenage pregnancy in Aberdeen, Scotland and to assess the discriminating ability of three measures of socioeconomic status. METHODS This was a population-based study from 1950 to 2010, using data from the Aberde...

The aging population calls for instruments to assess functional and cognitive impairment in the elderly, aiming to prevent conditions that affect functional abilities. Objective To verify the accuracy and reliability of the Pfeffer (FAQ) scale for the Brazilian elderly population and to evaluate the reliability and reproducibility of the translated version of the Pfeffer Questionnaire. Meth...

The Visual Concept Detection Task (VCDT) of ImageCLEF 2008 is described. A database of 2,827 images were manually annotated with 17 concepts. Of these, 1,827 were used for training and 1,000 for testing the automated assignment of categories. In total 11 groups participated and submitted 53 runs. The runs were evaluated using ROC curves, from which the Area Under the Curve (AUC) and Equal Error...