OBJECTIVE We aimed to determine the corneal confocal microscopy (CCM) parameter that best identifies diabetic sensorimotor polyneuropathy (DSP) in type 1 diabetes and to describe its performance characteristics. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Concurrent with clinical and electrophysiological examination for classification of DSP, CCM was performed on 89 type 1 diabetic and 64 healthy subjects to...

OBJECTIVE To predict the development of carcinoid heart disease (CHD), which is a life-threatening complication of certain neuroendocrine tumors. To this end, a novel type of Bayesian classifier, known as the noisy-threshold classifier, is applied. MATERIALS AND METHODS Fifty-four cases of patients that suffered from a low-grade midgut carcinoid tumor, of which 22 patients developed CHD, were...

A receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve is a plot of predictive model probabilities of true positives (sensitivity) as a function of probabilities of false positives (1 – specificity) for a set of possible cutoff points. Some of the SAS/STAT procedures do not have built-in options for ROC curves and there have been a few suggestions in previous SAS forums to address the issue by using e...

BACKGROUND Chest pain can be caused by various conditions, with life-threatening cardiac disease being of greatest concern. Prediction scores to rule out coronary artery disease have been developed for use in emergency settings. We developed and validated a simple prediction rule for use in primary care. METHODS We conducted a cross-sectional diagnostic study in 74 primary care practices in G...

BACKGROUND A prospective regional study was conducted to identify factors associated with in-hospital mortality among patients undergoing isolated coronary artery bypass graft surgery (CABG). A prediction rule was developed and validated based on the data collected. METHODS AND RESULTS Data from 3,055 patients were collected from five clinical centers between July 1, 1987, and April 15, 1989....

AIM This paper reports an investigation of the diagnostic accuracy of the Care Dependency Scale (CDS). BACKGROUND Assessment tools can be described in terms of diagnostic accuracy, or the ability to correctly classify subjects into clinically relevant subgroups. Diagnostic accuracy can be determined by several techniques as sensitivity, specificity, receiver operating curve analysis and likel...

In the problem of binary classification or diagnostic testing, the classification algorithm or diagnostic test produces a continuous decision variable which is compared to a critical value (or threshold). Test values above (or below) that threshold are called positive (or negative) for disease. There are two types of errors at every threshold value. The relationship between these two types is t...

Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis is a widely accepted method for analyzing and comparing the diagnostic accuracy of radiological tests. In this paper we will explain the basic principles underlying ROC analysis and provide practical information on the use and interpretation of ROC curves. The major applications of ROC analysis will be discussed and their limitations will be addr...

In supervised learning when acquiring good quality labels is hard, practitioners resort to getting the data labeled by multiple noisy annotators. Various methods have been proposed to estimate the consensus labels for binary and categorical labels. A commonly used paradigm to annotate instances when the labels are inherently subjective is to use ordinal scales. In this paper we propose annotato...

The contents of this report reflect the views of the authors who are responsible for the facts and the accuracy of the data presented herein. The contents do not necessarily reflect the official views or policies of the State of California. This paper has been mechanically scanned. Some errors may have been inadvertently introduced. Abstract A fuzzy rule-based controller is applied to lateral g...