17.6 - Summary

In this lesson, among other things, we learned how to:

• calculate and provide confidence intervals for the sensitivity and specificity of a diagnostic test,
• calculate accuracy and predictive values of a diagnostic test,
• state the relationship of prevalence of disease to the sensitivity, specificity and predictive values of a diagnostic test,
• test whether sensitivity or specificity of 2 tests are significantly different, whether the results come from a study in two groups of patients or one group of patients tested with both tests, and
• select an appropriate cut-off for a positive test result, given an ROC curve, for different cost ratios of false positive/false negative results.