Developing the Topic and Structuring Systematic Reviews of Medical Tests: Utility of PICOTS, Analytic Frameworks, Decision Trees, and Other Frameworks

Topic development and structuring a systematic review of diagnostic tests are complementary processes. The goals of a medical test review are: to identify and synthesize evidence to evaluate the impacts of alternative testing strategies on health outcomes and to promote informed decisionmaking. A common challenge is that the request for a review may state the claim for the test ambiguously. Due to the indirect impact of medical tests on clinical outcomes, reviewers need to identify which intermediate outcomes link a medical test to improved clinical outcomes. In this paper, we propose the use of five principles to deal with challenges: the PICOTS typology (atient population, ntervention, omparator, utcomes, iming, etting), analytic frameworks, simple decision trees, other organizing frameworks, and rules for when diagnostic accuracy is sufficient.