Wilson Kyle J, Roldán-Nofuentes José A, Henrion Marc Y R
University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L7 8TX, UK.
Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme, Blantyre, Southern Region, Malawi.
Wellcome Open Res. 2024 Nov 26;9:351. doi: 10.12688/wellcomeopenres.22411.3. eCollection 2024.
Binary diagnostic tests are commonly used in medicine to answer a question about a patient's clinical status, most commonly, do they or do they not have some disease. Recent advances in statistical methodologies for performing inferential statistics to compare commonly used test metrics for two diagnostic tests have not yet been implemented in a statistical package.
Up-to-date statistical methods to compare the test metrics achieved by two binary diagnostic tests are implemented in the new R package testCompareR. The output and efficiency of testCompareR is compared to the only other available package which performs this function, DTComPair, as well as an open-source program, compbdt, using a motivating example.
testCompareR achieves similar results to DTComPair using statistical methods with improved coverage and asymptotic performance. Further, testCompareR is faster than the currently available package and requires fewer pre-processing steps in order to produce accurate results.
testCompareR provides a new tool to compare the test metrics for two binary diagnostic tests compared with the gold standard. This tool allows flexible inputs, which minimises the need for data pre-processing, and operates in very few steps, so that it is easy to use even for those less experienced with R. testCompareR achieves results comparable to those computed by DTComPair, using optimised statistical methods and with improved computational efficiency.
二元诊断测试在医学中常用于回答有关患者临床状况的问题，最常见的是他们是否患有某种疾病。用于进行推断统计以比较两种诊断测试常用测试指标的统计方法的最新进展尚未在统计软件包中实现。
新的R包testCompareR中实现了用于比较两种二元诊断测试所获得的测试指标的最新统计方法。使用一个激励性示例，将testCompareR的输出和效率与另一个执行此功能的可用包DTComPair以及一个开源程序compbdt进行比较。
使用具有改进的覆盖率和渐近性能的统计方法，testCompareR与DTComPair取得了相似的结果。此外，testCompareR比当前可用的包更快，并且为了产生准确的结果需要更少的预处理步骤。
testCompareR提供了一种新工具，用于将两种二元诊断测试的测试指标与金标准进行比较。该工具允许灵活输入，从而最大限度地减少数据预处理的需求，并且只需很少的步骤即可运行，因此即使对于那些R经验较少的人来说也很容易使用。testCompareR使用优化的统计方法并提高了计算效率，取得了与DTComPair计算结果相当的结果。
