Accurate diagnosis of disease is a critical part of health care. New diagnostic and screening tests must be evaluated based on their abilities to discriminate diseased from nondiseased states. The partial area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve is a measure of diagnostic test accuracy. We present an interpretation of the partial area under the curve (AUC), which gives rise ...

The mission of RISER (Research Institute on Secondary Education Reform for Youth with Disabilities) is to expand the current knowledge base related to practices and policies in secondary schools that enhance learning, achievement, and postschool outcomes for all students. Transition practices related to career development are an important aspect of secondary education reform (Hanley-Maxwell, Ph...

The purpose of this study was to assess the utility of two instruments (the Braden scale and a multi-pad pressure evaluator) for predicting pressure ulcer development. A prospective cohort design was used and 105 intensive care unit patients participated in this study. The result was a 33% incidence of pressure ulcers. Both the Braden score and the multi-pad pressure evaluator instruments gave ...

Core needle biopsy (CNB) of salivary gland lesions is a relatively new technique that may offer benefits for diagnosis of the lesions. We conducted a systematic literature review to identify studies published between January 1, 1985, and March 15, 2011. Summary estimates of sensitivity and specificity were obtained by using a summary receiver-operating characteristic (SROC) curve. Study quality...

The original and modified Mallampati tests are commonly used to predict the difficult airway, but there is controversy regarding their accuracy. We searched MEDLINE and other databases for prospective studies of patients undergoing general anesthesia in which the results of a preoperative Mallampati test were compared with the subsequent rate of difficult airway (difficult laryngoscopy, difficu...

The area under the ROC curve (AUC) is a well-known measure of ranking performance, and is also often used as a measure of classification performance, aggregating over decision thresholds as well as class and cost skews. However, David Hand has recently argued that AUC is fundamentally incoherent as a measure of aggregated classifier performance and proposed an alternative measure [5]. Specifica...

BACKGROUND The diagnostic values of interferon-gamma release assays (IGRA) in tuberculosis (TB) vary a lot with different site of infections, with especially higher sensitivities in chronic forms of TB such as tuberculosis of the lymph node. We conducted a meta-analysis to comprehensively evaluate the overall accuracy of diagnostic IGRA for tuberculous lymphadenitis. METHODS Pubmed, Web of Sc...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the value of liquid-based cytology (LBC) in the diagnosis of urothelial carcinoma. METHOD Diagnostic studies were searched for the diagnostic value of LBC in urothelial carcinoma in PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library, Web of Science, CBM and CNKI. The latest retrieval date was September 2014. The data were extracted and the quality of the included studies was independently...

BACKGROUND In previous decades, chromogranin A (CgA) has been demonstrated to be the most promising biomarker for the diagnosis of neuroendocrine tumors (NETs), but its diagnostic value is still controversial. This meta-analysis aimed to estimate the potential diagnostic value of circulating CgA for NETs. METHODS We collected relevant studies from several electronic databases as well as from ...

Many studies manifested miRNA-100 was deregulated in various cancers, which indicated that miRNA-100 might be a potential biomarker of cancer diagnosis and prognosis. However, the role of miRNA-100 was still uncertain. We searched for qualified studies using PubMed, EMBASE, Web of Science, Cochrane library and CNKI databases. The diagnostic effect was evaluated by the pooled sensitivity, specif...