Gerke Oke
Department of Nuclear Medicine, Odense University Hospital, Kløvervænget 47, 5000 Odense, Denmark.
Department of Clinical Research, University of Southern Denmark, 5000 Odense, Denmark.
Diagnostics (Basel). 2020 May 22;10(5):334. doi: 10.3390/diagnostics10050334.
The Bland-Altman Limits of Agreement is a popular and widespread means of analyzing the agreement of two methods, instruments, or raters in quantitative outcomes. An agreement analysis could be reported as a stand-alone research article but it is more often conducted as a minor quality assurance project in a subgroup of patients, as a part of a larger diagnostic accuracy study, clinical trial, or epidemiological survey. Consequently, such an analysis is often limited to brief descriptions in the main report. Therefore, in several medical fields, it has been recommended to report specific items related to the Bland-Altman analysis. The present study aimed to identify the most comprehensive and appropriate list of items for such an analysis. Seven proposals were identified from a MEDLINE/PubMed search, three of which were derived by reviewing anesthesia journals. Broad consensus was seen for the a priori establishment of acceptability benchmarks, estimation of repeatability of measurements, description of the data structure, visual assessment of the normality and homogeneity assumption, and plotting and numerically reporting both bias and the Bland-Altman Limits of Agreement, including respective 95% confidence intervals. Abu-Arafeh et al. provided the most comprehensive and prudent list, identifying 13 key items for reporting (Br. J. Anaesth. 2016, 117, 569-575). An exemplification with interrater data from a local study accentuated the straightforwardness of transparent reporting of the Bland-Altman analysis. The 13 key items should be applied by researchers, journal editors, and reviewers in the future, to increase the quality of reporting Bland-Altman agreement analyses.
布兰德-奥特曼一致性界限是分析两种方法、仪器或评估者在定量结果方面一致性的一种流行且广泛使用的方法。一致性分析可以作为一篇独立的研究文章进行报道,但它更常作为一个较小的质量保证项目,在一组患者中开展,作为更大规模诊断准确性研究、临床试验或流行病学调查的一部分。因此,这种分析在主要报告中往往仅限于简短描述。所以,在几个医学领域,有人建议报告与布兰德-奥特曼分析相关的特定项目。本研究旨在确定此类分析最全面、合适的项目清单。通过检索MEDLINE/PubMed数据库确定了七项建议,其中三项是通过查阅麻醉学期刊得出的。对于事先确定可接受性基准、测量重复性估计、数据结构描述、对正态性和同质性假设进行视觉评估,以及绘制并以数值形式报告偏差和布兰德-奥特曼一致性界限(包括各自的95%置信区间),人们达成了广泛共识。Abu-Arafeh等人提供了最全面、审慎的清单,确定了13项关键报告项目(《英国麻醉学杂志》,2016年,第117卷,第569 - 575页)。通过对本地一项研究中评估者间数据的示例说明,突出了布兰德-奥特曼分析透明报告的直观性。未来,研究人员、期刊编辑和审稿人应应用这13项关键项目,以提高布兰德-奥特曼一致性分析报告的质量。