gms | German Medical Science

In confirmatory diagnostic accuracy studies sensitivity and specificity are recommended as co-primary endpoints [1]. Therefore, approaches which can deal with a bivariate outcome should be applied to meta-analyses of diagnostic accuracy studies [2]. Furthermore, sensitivity and specificity depend on the chosen cutoff-value. To conduct a diagnostic meta-analysis properly, the respective cutoff-values of the individual studies have to be taken into account accordingly. To make things more complicated, some individual studies provide us even with the results for more than one cutoff-value. Recently, different approaches were proposed for the meta-analysis of diagnostic accuracy studies with such multiple cutoff-values in the individual studies. In this dataset challenge researchers are invited to apply their approach to an exemplary meta-analysis. The provided dataset is about the diagnostic accuracy of a biomarker (NGAL) for the diagnosis of renal damage with three cutoff-values and corresponding pairs of sensitivity and specificity per study (extension from [3]). The contributors will shortly present their approach, its advantages as well as limitations, and discuss their results. We hope to publish the results of the dataset challenge in an article with all contributors as authors. If you are interested in participating, please contact Antonia Zapf (a.zapf@uke.de).

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

The authors declare that an ethics committee vote is not required.