Meta-analysis of diagnostic test accuracy (DTA) is a powerful statistical method for synthesizing and evaluating the diagnostic capacity of medical tests and has been extensively used by clinical physicians and healthcare decision-makers. However, publication bias (PB) threatens the validity of meta-analysis of DTA. Some statistical methods have…

We developed "metadta," a flexible, robust, and user-friendly statistical procedure that fuses established and innovative statistical methods for meta-analysis, meta-regression, and network meta-analysis of diagnostic test accuracy studies in Stata. Using data from published meta-analyses, we validate "metadta" by comparing and…

The accuracy of a diagnostic test is often expressed using a pair of measures: sensitivity (proportion of test positives among all individuals with target condition) and specificity (proportion of test negatives among all individuals without target condition). If the outcome of a diagnostic test is binary, results from different studies can easily…

Background: Individual patient data meta-analyses (IPD-MA) are regarded as the gold standard for systematic reviews, which also applies to systematic reviews of diagnostic test accuracy (DTA) studies. An increasing number of DTA systematic reviews with IPD-MA have been published in recent years, but there is much variation in how these IPD-MA were…

Selective cutoff reporting in primary diagnostic accuracy studies with continuous or ordinal data may result in biased estimates when meta-analyzing studies. Collecting individual participant data (IPD) and estimating accuracy across all relevant cutoffs for all studies can overcome such bias but is labour intensive. We meta-analyzed the…

This article critically reviews how diagnostic models have been conceptualized and how they compare to other approaches used in educational measurement. In particular, certain assumptions that have been taken for granted and used as defining characteristics of diagnostic models are reviewed and it is questioned whether these assumptions are the…

This study examined how timing (i.e., relative maturity) and rate (i.e., how quickly infants attain proficiency) of A-not-B performance were related to changes in brain activity from age 6 to 12 months. A-not-B performance and resting EEG (electroencephalography) were measured monthly from age 6 to 12 months in 28 infants and were modeled using…

In this digital ITEMS module, Dr. Jeffrey Harring and Ms. Tessa Johnson introduce the linear mixed effects (LME) model as a flexible general framework for simultaneously modeling continuous repeated measures data with a scientifically defensible function that adequately summarizes both individual change as well as the average response. The module…

Attribute structure is an explicit way of presenting the relationship between attributes in diagnostic measurement. The specification of attribute structures directly affects the classification accuracy resulted from psychometric modeling. This study provides a conceptual framework for understanding misspecifications of attribute structures. Under…

Percentage study weights in meta-analysis reveal the contribution of each study toward the overall summary results and are especially important when some studies are considered outliers or at high risk of bias. In meta-analyses of test accuracy reviews, such as a bivariate meta-analysis of sensitivity and specificity, the percentage study weights…

Although looking-time methods have long been used to measure infant attention and investigate aspects of cognitive development, steady-state visually evoked potential (SSVEP) measures may be more sensitive or practical in some contexts. Here, we demonstrate habituation of infants' SSVEP amplitudes to a flickering checkerboard stimulus, and…

Altered sensory perception has been found in patients with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and might be related to aberrant sensory perception thresholds. We used the well-established, standardized Quantitative sensory testing (QST) protocol of the German Research Network on Neuropathic Pain to investigate 13 somatosensory parameters including…

An anaphoric reference to the complement-set is a reference to the set that does not fulfil the predicate of the preceding sentence. Preferred reference to the complement-set has been found in eye movements when a character's implicit desire for a high amount has been denied using a negative emotion. We recorded event-related potentials to examine…

The present study aimed to evaluate the applicability of artisanal simulators to teach veterinary and medical students the ultrasound-guided percutaneous biopsy using a tru-cut needle. The artisanal simulators consisted of bovine liver between two layers of commercially available grape gelatin. Students were paired, with one doing the biopsy and…

Word learning from linguistic context is essential for vocabulary growth from grade school onward; however, little is known about the mechanisms underlying successful word learning in children. Current methods for studying word learning development require children to identify the meaning of the word after each exposure, a method that interacts…