PUBLICATIONS & TOOLS

Breaking through the barriers so you can easily learn the key words used to describe diagnostic studies. Participate in the friendly pause and think exercises to empower you to describe and identify concepts in which participants to recruit to your diagnostic accuracy study.

Helping you understand how important thinking about clinical pathway is when designing your study. Participate in the friendly pause and think exercises to empower you to think about the importance of designing a diagnostic accuracy study around the relevant clinical pathway.

Helping you understand diagnostic outcomes including sensitivity, specificity, PPV and NPV.

This video about designing diagnostic accuracy studies, talks you through how patient spectrum (getting full range of disease severity) can be affected by different study designs such as cross section, cohort and case-control studies

Giving you links and references to really useful resources for designing, running and reporting your diagnostic studies and diagnostic systematic reviews.

Helping you understand how the selection of patients for a diagnostic accuracy study affects the patient spectrum and so whether results are reliable to guide clinical practice. We also illustrate how to convert sensitivity and specificity into numbers of patients, so the numbers start to speak for themselves. Participate in the friendly pause and think exercises to help you identify how thinking carefully about who we want diagnostic results to apply for, helps us think about who to enrol in a study. We look at an example for COVID-19 lateral flow test results in symptomatic and asymptomatic persons. We practice converting sensitivity and specificity into numbers of patients.

Helping you understand how and why we compare tests in diagnostic accuracy studies, and the importance of comparing to current practice. We look at study designs with direct comparison of tests and the dangers of indirect comparisons. Participate in the friendly pause and think exercises to help you draw a flow chart for a diagnostic comparison study and chose a comparison arm. We also use an exercise to think through the problems and risk of bias when we use indirect comparisons of diagnostic tests.

Helping you understand early phase and clinical phase studies in diagnostic accuracy, and which results are reliable to guide clinical practice. We also start to identify what other evidence we need beyond diagnostic accuracy Participate in the friendly pause and think exercises to help you identify relevant studies to guide clinical practice.