English

Confidence interval for the AUC of SROC curve and some related methods using bootstrap for meta-analysis of diagnostic accuracy studies

Applications 2022-08-02 v3

Abstract

The area under the curve (AUC) of summary receiver operating characteristic (SROC) curve is a primary statistical outcome for meta-analysis of diagnostic test accuracy studies (DTA). However, its confidence interval has not been reported in most of DTA meta-analyses, because no certain methods and statistical packages have been provided. In this article, we provide a bootstrap algorithm for computing the confidence interval of the AUC. Also, using the bootstrap framework, we can conduct a bootstrap test for assessing significance of the difference of AUCs for multiple diagnostic tests. In addition, we provide an influence diagnostic method based on the AUC by leave-one-study-out analyses. We present illustrative examples using two DTA met-analyses for diagnostic tests of cervical cancer and asthma. We also developed an easy-to-handle R package dmetatools for these computations. The various quantitative evidence provided by these methods certainly supports the interpretations and precise evaluations of statistical evidence of DTA meta-analyses.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2004.04339,
  title  = {Confidence interval for the AUC of SROC curve and some related methods using bootstrap for meta-analysis of diagnostic accuracy studies},
  author = {Hisashi Noma and Yuki Matsushima and Ryota Ishii},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.04339},
  year   = {2022}
}