BACKGROUND Rater agreement is important in clinical research, and Cohen's Kappa is a widely used method for assessing inter-rater reliability; however, there are well documented statistical problems associated with the measure. In order to assess its utility, we evaluated it against Gwet's AC1 and compared the results. METHODS This study was carried out across 67 patients (56% males) aged 18 ...

BACKGROUND Numerous criteria believed to define a positive response to cardiac resynchronization therapy have been used in the literature. No study has investigated agreement among these response criteria. We hypothesized that the agreement among the various response criteria would be poor. METHODS AND RESULTS A literature search was conducted with the keywords "cardiac resynchronization" and...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to evaluate the degree of agreement among endosonographers for EUS diagnosis of neoplastic versus non-neoplastic pancreatic cystic lesions and the specific type of cystic lesion. METHODS Videotapes of EUS procedures from 31 consecutive cases of a range of histopathologically proven lesions, including mucinous cystic neoplasm, serous cystadenoma, neuroendoc...

BACKGROUND: In the era of novel antiviral drugs for treatment of chronic viral hepatitis C (HCV), the diagnosis of liver cirrhosis guides both the choice of the drug regimen, duration of treatment and subsequent follow up. Transient elastography (TE) (fibroscan) is a recent, non invasive and reliable method for the diagnosis of cirrhosis in patients with chronic HCV. We aimed at demonstrating t...

Cohen’s weighted kappa is a popular descriptive statistic for measuring the agreement between two raters on an ordinal scale. Popular weights for weighted kappa are the linear weights and the quadratic weights. It has been frequently observed in the literature that the value of the quadratically weighted kappa is higher than the value of the linearly weighted kappa. In this paper this phenomeno...

Because morphopathological diagnosis of tumors plays a key role in prognosis and therapeutic decisions, the reproducibility and coherence among pathologists is important. To determine the level of inter-observer variation among veterinary pathologists for the diagnosis of canine mammary gland tumors, 15 canine mammary gland tumor slides were coded and evaluated independently by 10 veterinary pa...

The objective of the present study was to evaluate the completeness and agreement between data obtained from the Live Birth Information System (SINASC) and hospital records for high neonatal risk situations. Using RecLink III software, a probabilistic data linkage was carried out using databases from a Public Health Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and SINASC (years 2005-2006), which made possible ...

What does this article say? Mark: This was a study of Framingham patients older than 50 years who were randomly selected to have magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of their knees without regard to whether they had knee pain. Overall, 1,039 patients were screened, and of these, 991 had a readable MRI. All MRI films were read by one person with a background in orthopedics who looked exclusively at ...

BACKGROUND Correct diagnosis is key to appropriate treatment of cancer in children. However, diagnostic challenges are common in low-income and middle-income countries. The objective of the present study was to assess the agreement between a clinical diagnosis of childhood non- Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) assigned in Uganda, a pathological diagnosis assigned in Uganda, and a pathological diagnosis a...