OBJECTIVE To propose and validate a new subjective grading system of adenoid size with flexible fiberoptic evaluation. STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING Digital video clips of 24 flexible fiberoptic nasopharyngeal exams were presented to 24 examiners (otolaryngology resident and consultant physicians) at a tertiary care institution. Examiners were asked to use the proposed grading system to rate adeno...

AIM To examine the feasibility of using peer review for the quality control of online materials. METHODS We analyzed the inter-rater agreement on the quality of epidemiological lectures online, based on the Global Health Network Supercourse lecture library. We examined the agreement among reviewers by looking at kappa statistics and intraclass correlations. Seven expert reviewers examined and...

We studied the reproducibility of ultrasonographic screening examination of the hip when read by diagnostic radiographers. In order to determine interobserver variability, 200 ultrasonograms were classified according to Graf's method by five observers (four radiographers and one radiologist). The kappa values for interobserver variability indicated moderate agreement (kappa 0.47) for the exact ...

BACKGROUND This study assessed the degree of diagnostic agreement among community-based general pathologists reading slides of representative breast tissue specimens and tested whether diagnostic variability is associated with type of breast specimen (e.g., core needle or excisional biopsy) or slide quality. METHODS Twenty-six of the 44 eligible pathologists working at community-based patholo...

Content analysis involves classification of textual, visual, or audio data. The inter-coder agreement is estimated by making two or more coders to classify the same data units, with subsequent comparison of their results. The existing methods of agreement estimation, e.g., Cohen's kappa, require that coders place each unit of content into one and only one category (one-to-one coding) from the p...

Currently, computational linguists and cognitive scientists working in the area of discourse and dialogue argue that their subjective judgments are reliable using several diierent statistics, none of which are easily interpretable or comparable to each other. Meanwhile, researchers in content analysis have already experienced the same diiculties and come up with a solution in the kappa statisti...

BACKGROUND The soft tissues injury in periarticular fractures of the lower extremities determines the proper time to perform bone fixation. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to determine the intra and interobserver agreement in the Tscherne classification. METHODS This is a descriptive, prospective study for patients admitted to the Pablo Tobón Uribe Hospital (PTUH) with tibial plateau or...

BACKGROUND Pneumonia diagnosed using chest radiographs is often used as a study end point in trials and epidemiological studies. We studied whether training of the end-users in 172 standardized chest radiographic features will decrease variability in the interpretation. METHODS Inter-observer variation of 3 observers in recognizing standardized radiographic features for pneumonia was studied ...

This study describes the extent of agreement in classification of chest radiographs using the International Labor Organization (ILO) classification among six readers from the United States and Canada. A set of 119 radiographs was created and read by three Canadian and three US readers. The two ratings of interest were profusion (scored from 0/. to 3/+) and pleural abnormalities consistent with ...

Background Cohen's Kappa is the most used agreement statistic in literature. However, under certain conditions, it is affected by a paradox which returns biased estimates of the statistic itself. Objective The aim of the study is to provide sufficient information which allows the reader to make an informed choice of the correct agreement measure, by underlining some optimal properties of Gwet...