Introduction The performance of diagnostic health technologies is usually assessed by comparing them with standard care using the kappa statistic. These comparisons are made based on comprehensive clinical information (e.g., anamnesis and complementary tests). However, not all digital applications (DAs) execute over complete information, which leads to work under non-uniform distribution values...

BACKGROUND The aim of this pilot study was to test whether diagnostic agreement of aggressive and chronic periodontitis amongst Board Certified Periodontists, is influenced by knowledge of a patient's age. In 1999 at the International World Workshop age was removed as a diagnostic criteria for aggressive periodontitis. The impact of this change on the diagnostic reliability amongst clinicians h...

OBJECTIVE To quantify the interobserver variability in establishing a systematic classification for the operative morbidity of lung resection. METHODS Morbidity was classified retrospectively in a series of 499 prospective registries of patients who underwent major lung resection (458 lobectomies and 51 pneumonectomies). The systematic classification proposed by Seely et al. in 2010 was used....

Information retrieval studies that involve searching the Internet or marking phrases usually lack a well-defined number of negative cases. This prevents the use of traditional interrater reliability metrics like the kappa statistic to assess the quality of expert-generated gold standards. Such studies often quantify system performance as precision, recall, and F-measure, or as agreement. It can...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The modified Rankin Scale (mRS) is widely used to assess global outcome after stroke. The aim of the study was to examine rater variability in assessing functional outcomes using the conventional mRS, and to investigate whether use of a structured interview (mRS-SI) reduced this variability. METHODS Inter-rater agreement was studied among raters from 3 stroke centers. F...

BACKGROUND Social franchising programs in low- and middle-income countries have tried using the standard wealth index, based on the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) questionnaire, in client exit interviews to assess clients' relative wealth compared with the national wealth distribution to ensure equity in service delivery. The large number of survey questions required to capture the wealth ...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the validity and reliability of computerised acoustic analysis in the detection of abnormal respiratory noises in infants. METHODS Blinded, prospective comparison of acoustic analysis with stethoscope examination. Validity and reliability of acoustic analysis were assessed by calculating the degree of observer agreement using the kappa statistic with 95% confidence in...

AIM This study compares the usefulness of Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) to Standardized Mini-Mental Status Exam (SMMSE) for diagnosing mild cognitive impairment (MCI) in Type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM) population. METHODS This prospective pilot study enrolled 30 community dwelling adults with Type 2 DM aged 50 years and above. Subjects were assessed using both the SMMSE and MoCA for MCI....

BACKGROUND The Paul Coverdell National Acute Stroke Registry (PCNASR) is a U.S. based national registry designed to monitor and improve the quality of acute stroke care delivered by hospitals. The registry monitors care through specific performance measures, the accuracy of which depends in part on the reliability of the individual data elements used to construct them. This study describes the ...