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Confidence interval for the AUC of SROC curve and some related methods using bootstrap for meta-analysis of diagnostic accuracy studies

H. Noma, Yuki Matsushima, Ryota Ishii

Communications in Statistics Case Studies Data Analysis and Applications, 2020

64 citations

Abstract

Abstract–The area under the curve (AUC) of summary receiver operating characteristic (SROC) curve is a primary statistical outcome for meta-analysis of diagnostic test accuracy studies (DTA). However, its confidence interval has not been reported in most of DTA meta-analyses, because no certain methods and statistical packages have been provided. In this article, we provide a bootstrap algorithm for computing the confidence interval of the AUC. Also, using the bootstrap framework, we can conduct a bootstrap test for assessing significance of the difference of AUCs for two diagnostic tests. In addition, we provide an influence diagnostic method based on the AUC by leave-one-study-out analyses. We present illustrative examples using two DTA met-analyses for diagnostic tests of cervical cancer and asthma. We also developed an easy-to-handle R package dmetatools for these computations. The various quantitative evidence provided by these methods certainly supports the interpretations and precise evaluations of statistical evidence of DTA meta-analyses.

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