CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by RERO DOC Digital Library Intensive Care Med (2003) 29:1043–1051 DOI 10.1007/s00134-003-1761-8 REVIEW Joachim E. Fischer A readers’ guide to the interpretation Lucas M. Bachmann Roman Jaeschke of diagnostic test properties: clinical example of sepsis Received: 30 October 2002 Abstract Background: One of the hood ratios, pretest probability, post- Accepted: 13 March 2003 most challenging practical and daily test probability, and diagnostic odds Published online: 7 May 2003 problems in intensive care medicine ratio. Conclusions: We suggest the © Springer-Verlag 2003 is the interpretation of the results following minimal requirements for from diagnostic tests. In neonatology reporting on the diagnostic accuracy and pediatric intensive care the early of tests: a plot of the raw data, multi- diagnosis of potentially life-threaten- level likelihood ratios, the area under ing infections is a particularly impor- the receiver operating characteristic tant issue. Focus: A plethora of tests curve, and the cutoff yielding the J. E. Fischer (✉) have been suggested to improve di- highest discriminative ability. For Department of Pediatrics, agnostic decision making in the clin- critical appraisal it is mandatory to University Children’s Hospital, Steinweisstrasse 75, 8032 Zurich, ical setting of infection which is a report confidence intervals for each Switzerland clinical example used in this article. of these measures. Moreover, to al- e-mail:
[email protected] Several criteria that are critical to ev- low comparison to the readers’ pa- Tel.: +41-1-2667751 idence-based appraisal of published tient population authors should pro- Fax: +41-1-2667164 data are often not adhered to during vide data on study population char- L.