Serodiagnostic tests. Evaluation and interpretation in veterinary medicine and other special fields (Q1866510)

Concepts and methods for the evaluation of diagnostic tests are given in this book concentrating on applications in veterinary medicine. General principles of diagnostic tests and their position in a diagnostic process are presented in Chapter 1, emphasizing the aggregate and the bulk test as well as multiple tests. Chapter 2 considers concepts and practical issues of quality assurance in veterinary serology and proposes strategies to prevent the generation and use of erroneous data and methods. Quality criteria and statistical methods for the evaluation are elaborated in Chapter 3, also recurring to underlying sampling schemes. A detailed list of sources and types of biases in evaluation studies (sometimes also called validation studies) is given. Chapter 4 deals then with methods of statistical inference and evaluation of four diagnostic test situations: (a) the aggregate test used to test a population of individuals, (b) multiple tests when one individual is subject to more than one test, (c) evaluation methods in the absence of a gold standard, and (d) meta-analyses of diagnostic tests. Usage, implications and methods for the determination of cut-off values are investigated in Chapter 5 with special consideration of the ELISA test example. The ROC analysis is presented as a global method to assess the value of a test. Situations and problems of typical applications of diagnostic tests are discussed in Chapter 6, e.g., loss of information through dichotomizing continuous data, the concept of likelihood ratios, and the adjustment for misclassification in prevalence studies. An important part of the book are three appendices which extend the text through methods and examples. Appendix A considers methods for estimating sensitivity and specificity under different sampling schemes (including notes on the STATA program package). Appendix B presents advanced examples on applications of tests in the cases of interlaboratory variability, mixture distributions for estimating prevalence, influence of latent periods, serodiagnosis of trichinella in humans and pigs, cost evaluation in the case of trichinella, and a latent class model. Some mathematical details are given in appendix C. Each chapter is introduced by a short informative content description and numerous examples are given. The book has been compiled as the authors `Habilitationsschrift' at the Department of Veterinary Medicine of the FU Berlin and is therefore written in German. It refers to numerous original papers of the author written in English.