Abstract
Although severity of illness may affect the usefulness of a diagnostic test, most previous work has considered test performance only in the dichotomous situation where the target disorder is considered present or absent. In this paper, a clinical example is provided and two methods presented whereby illness severity may be incorporated into the determination of likelihood ratios for a diagnostic test. The use of this approach is that given a test result, a clinician may determine the post-test probability of all levels of the illness in the patient under study.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 38-42 |
Number of pages | 5 |
Journal | American Journal of the Medical Sciences |
Volume | 299 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 1990 |
Keywords
- diagnostic test
- likelihood ratios
- sensitivity
- specificity
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Medicine(all)