Stats
Meta-analysis and diagnostic tests (February 14, 2006)
Category: Systematic overviews
I will be giving a talk at the graduate seminar series for the department of Mathematics
and Statistics at UMKC on February 23. It will be a combination of material from the
following web pages:
The title of the talk will be "Meta-analysis and diagnostic tests." and here is my
abstract:
Meta-analysis is the quantitative combination of results from multiple research
studies. Meta-analysis is a relatively new field in Statistics, and standards for the
proper data analysis are still evolving. Meta-analysis of studies of diagnostic tests,
in particular, is especially controversial, with many conflicting approaches for
computing an overall estimate from the individual sensitivity or specificity values from
these studies. In the first half of this talk, I will review the general methods for the
quantitative combination of results in a meta-analysis, and work out two examples using
R and the meta library. In the second half, I will use data from a meta-analysis of 20
studies of endovaginal ultrasonography for detecting endometrial cancer to illustrate
and critically evaluate several competing approaches for quantitatively combining
results from diagnostic studies. All the data sets used in this presentation come from
journal articles where the full free text is available on the web. A handout for this
seminar can be found at
www.childrens-mercy.org/stats/training/hand67.asp.
07/08/2008.
