OBJECTIVE To evaluate the diagnostic usefulness of cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) cellularity, protein, neutrophils, glucose and lactate for detection of postoperative bacterial meningitis. METHOD This prospective study was conducted in 28 postoperative neurosurgical patients from 2002 to 2005 at University of São Paulo. The CSF markers were plotted in a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) c...

The relative operating characteristic (ROC) curve is a highly flexible method for representing the quality of dichotomous, categorical, continuous, and probabilistic forecasts. The method is based on ratios that measure the proportions of events and nonevents for which warnings were provided. These ratios provide estimates of the probabilities that an event will be forewarned and that an incorr...

The purpose of this study was to establish health-related waist-to-height ratio (WHtR) cut-points associating with FITNESSGRAM's body mass index (BMI) criterion-referenced standards in low-income children. A secondary aim was to examine the classification agreement between the derived WHtR cut-points and various cardiometabolic blood markers using current recommendations. Participants were 219 ...

This paper presents an approach that enables automatic titling of e-mails relying on the morphosyntactic study of real titles. Automatic titling of e-mails has two interests: Titling mails ’no object’ and managing personal information. The method is developed in three stages: Candidate sentences determination for titling, noun phrases extraction in the candidate sentences, and finally, selectin...

One approach to evaluating the strength of association between a longitudinal marker process and a key clinical event time is through predictive regression methods such as a time-dependent covariate hazard model. For example, a Cox model with time-varying covariates specifies the instantaneous risk of the event as a function of the time-varying marker and additional covariates. In this manuscri...

OBJECTIVES To determine the diagnostic accuracy of the measurement of plasma B-type natriuretic peptide (BNP) and N-terminal pro-BNP (NTproBNP) in patients referred by their general practitioners (GPs) with symptoms suggestive of heart failure. Additionally, to compare the diagnostic accuracy of the resting 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) with that of the peptides. DESIGN A diagnostic accurac...

Diagnostic accuracy can be improved considerably by combining multiple markers, whose performance in identifying diseased subjects is usually assessed via receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. The selection of multimarker signatures is a complicated process that requires integration of data signatures with sophisticated statistical methods. We developed a user-friendly tool, called Co...

BACKGROUND Efforts are underway to eliminate trachoma as a public health problem by 2020. Programmatic guidelines are based on clinical signs that correlate poorly with Chlamydia trachomatis (Ct) infection in post-treatment and low-endemicity settings. Age-specific seroprevalence of anti Ct Pgp3 antibodies has been proposed as an alternative indicator of the need for intervention. To standardis...

CONTEXT Although it is common practice to read tests with clinical information, whether this improves or decreases the accuracy of test reading is uncertain. OBJECTIVE To determine whether diagnostic tests are more accurate when read with clinical information or without it. DATA SOURCES MEDLINE search (1966-December 2003) extended by search of reference lists and articles citing the article...

We address the problem of comparing the performance of classifiers. In this paper we study techniques for generating and evaluating confidence bands on ROC curves. Historically this has been done using one-dimensional confidence intervals by freezing one variable—the false-positive rate, or threshold on the classification scoring function. We adapt two prior methods and introduce a new radial s...