Effect of heterogeneous dependence between two tests on estimation of diagnostic accuracy for semi-latent screening data

• Main Authors: Ching-Hsun Ho, 何慶勳
• Other Authors: Jen Tai
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/96459855729289601779

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 流行病學研究所 === 97 === When diagnosing a disease in a screening program, two diagnostic tests may be applied simultaneously. To confirm the accuracy of the two tests, a third gold standard test will usually be also used. However, due to realistic reasons, the confirmatory procedure is limited to individuals with positive results. Previous approaches assumed independence or homogeneous dependence of the two tests and used maximum likelihood or capture-recapture method to estimate the accuracy for each test. However, there are controversies about the dependence assumptions. Therefore, in this thesis we adopted two dependent models for discussing the influence of heterogeneous dependence on diagnostic accuracy. The results indicate that the direction of dependence will not affect accuracy estimates, but the strength will.