Diagnostic tests

Molecularly targeted cancer drugs are often developed with companion diagnostics that attempt to identify which patients will have better outcome on the new drug than the control regimen. Such predictive biomarkers are playing an increasingly important role in precision oncology. For diagnostic tests, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive are usually used as performance measures. This paper discusses these indices for predictive biomarkers, provides methods for their calculation with survival or response endpoints, and describes assumptions involved in their use...

Cancer screening is an important component of prevention and early detection in public health and clinical medicine. The evidence for cancer screening, however, is often contentious. A description and explanation of disagreements over the evidence for cervical, breast, and prostate screening may assist physicians, policymakers, and citizens faced with screening decisions and suggest directions for future screening research. There are particular issues to be aware of in the evidence base for each form of screening, which are summarized in this paper...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 370, Issue 14, Page 1350-1351, April 2014.

BACKGROUND: Evidence from randomized trials on the effects of screening for prostate cancer (PCa) on disease-specific mortality accumulates slowly with increasing follow-up. OBJECTIVE: To assess data on PCa-specific mortality in the Rotterdam section of the European Randomized Study of Screening for Prostate Cancer (ERSPC) trial. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: A randomized controlled trial with randomization after signed, written informed consent (efficacy trial)...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate whether mean platelet volume can be used as an inflammatory marker for the diagnosis of acute appendicitis, and to determine the role, if any, of white blood cell count, C-reactive protein and neutrophil count in this regard. METHODS: The retrospective study was conducted at Mersin University (MEU) Health Research and Application Center, Emergency Department, Mersin, Turkey, and included medical record of patients having gone appendectomy between April 2012 to July 2013...

PURPOSE: To prospectively develop and evaluate the accuracy of a duplex Doppler ultrasonographic (US) index for predicting the presence or absence of esophageal varices in patients with compensated cirrhosis (Child-Pugh class A) by using endoscopy as the reference standard. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The study had institutional review board approval; all participants gave informed consent. Data in a total of 383 prospectively enrolled patients who underwent duplex Doppler US and screening endoscopy were divided into training (n = 240) and validation (n = 143) sets...

The aim of the study is to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of noncontrast CT in detecting acute appendicitis. Prospective studies in which noncontrast CT was performed to evaluate acute appendicitis were found on PubMed, EMBASE, and Cochrane Library. Pooled sensitivity, specificity, positive likelihood ratio, negative likelihood ratio, and diagnostic odds ratio were assessed. The summary receiver-operating characteristic curve was conducted and the area under the curve was calculated. Seven original studies investigating a total of 845 patients were included in this meta-analysis...